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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/25758955">All the Past</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/allyourbase/pseuds/allyourbase'>allyourbase</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Original Work</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Bisexual Characters, M/M, Memory Loss, Science Fiction, Sexual Identity, Sexuality Discovery, Slow Burn, Stream of Consciousness, character driven, coming out to self, gay kiss, literary fiction, science vs art</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>In-Progress</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-08-07</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2021-04-17</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-05 04:55:52</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Teen And Up Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>30</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>49,131</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/25758955</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/allyourbase/pseuds/allyourbase</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>Set in a universe where memories can be targeted and abstracted, Zach is an ex-memorosurgeon seeking answers about a past self he deleted.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Original Male Character(s)/Original Female Character(s), Original Male Character/Original Male Character</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>2</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>1. Delete</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>“All the past plays into this moment, and we are what we are.” - Henry David Thoreau</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Zach put down his pen the same time he put down his drink. The half empty bottle of Nikka whiskey still open, his bloody fingers moved to pour himself another glass. His fingers had once been so smooth, gliding over piano keys, the computer keyboard, making music in the brains of patients, omitting the notes that created dissonance, gliding over Sarah’s hips, her legs. Fingers that brushed against her lips when he’d had too much to drink and she drew him closer all the more, taking his soft hands and pressing them against herself as he lay on her sage green linen sheets, his eyes scanning over the potted succulents that lined her shelves – the shelves that he built for her when she moved into the apartment after getting a job as a cosmetics sales representative, the shelves she ordered from one of those wholesaler websites that would have charged eighty percent just for assembly. He had come over with his wrench and hammer and opened the box while she put the kettle on the stove. It had been nearing their one year and he wondered about types of flowers and jewelry while he fit the boards into their nails, hitting his left thumb. She kissed it after sipping her tea, sucked on it until his brain no longer sensed the throbbing. The orange cat envied him for her affection. But his hands had been softer. </p>
<p>Now they were cut; jagged scrapes draped down over his knuckles. The blood was drying, but if there was one thing he didn’t learn in all his memorosurgeon training, it was how to dress an open wound. At least there were other things that numbed the pain. And he was sovereign over numbing: he was a master of obliterating, of vanishing pain, even if it already was one of the most difficult things to remember.</p>
<p>There was a scream. In his stupor, the sound blurred in his mind, obscured with resonant images that flickered before him, then blended into other faces from his past until his thoughts were as jumbled as the mixture in his glass. It came from down the hall; no, he’d only heard the echo. A man in a navy suit. Tiny hands and feet pulled into a vehicle. Long brown hair clumped together by the soaking tears brushed out of the eyes feverously, nails scratching the cheeks, tears mixing with blood. Dreams mixing with hallucinations, with recent memories, with memories from years ago, with perceptions of his apartment, each indistinguishable from one another. Long brown hair that grew short somehow, lighter, though still dampened with tears, flailing arms and legs. Another scream.</p>
<p>Grateful that the drink was already doing much of the work his glove would, he again looked down at his hands. Hands that grappled for something. Hands marked with scratches that would turn to scars, that would forever mark his once delicate knuckles, testifying to his struggle with, against, someone else.</p>
<p>Tangible objects that held memories could be discarded; pages with littered words, no matter how frantically written, could be ripped up, burned, condensed to a form void of ink, a form that could no longer be claimed by language, belonging again to the wind, to the sewer where it would end up; the body was a canvas that, once marked, would store the memory. Even after the memory was gone, the scars would remain, tugging him to a land whose border he would no longer be able to cross, an electric fence having been built by his own gloved hand, staked out and then razed to the ground, the ash leaving not a trace of what had once belonged there.</p>
<p>Another face too, rose out of a mess of images, a face attached to hands reaching out in desperation, that then quickly turned into his own. Gazing down at those hands, he felt a throbbing with a dull ache in his fist. A spiraling, a swerving, a black barrel staring down at him, contrasted against a pristine white coat, but even the threat of the weapon didn’t hold prominence in his consciousness - whatever that consciousness was - the way that he might fight off an angry face in a dream all while having a sense that there’s something more important he needed to get to, though he’s not even sure if that something is a person or a place or an abstract sense of something he knew he had to do: something a repeating voice reminded him morning and night, something he ignored every time those words were spoken, but, now that they’re gone for good, still haunt him at those same hours they had once been said. The prominence instead lying in the car ahead of him, hands that threw off other hands, turned into that fist before it started throbbing, knowing he’d never been violent, but a sense that somehow, this time, it was necessary. Gun shots and more screaming. The feeling of swerving again bubbling up to the surface, causing him to steady himself against the denim blue couch in his living room. </p>
<p>He ran his bloody hands over the velvet, trying to focus on that single object where he and Sarah sat so many times, where he’d hand her a drink and she’d just jabber on about her work while he stared at those silver crescent moon earrings, not hearing a word, wondering from which state or country she might have bought them.  </p>
<p>He poured himself another drink. He would visit Sarah. He wouldn’t tell her anything. She didn’t like it when he talked anyway. Words held too many memories in themselves. If nothing else, he could stare at her plants, asking again where she got them on all her trips to each state – the tiger tooth aloe from one of the Carolinas, the burro’s-tail from Maine. </p>
<p>Just write it down. It was something he got in the habit of every night before bed, always with a drink in his hand, scrambling to scrawl out the words while the drink detached him from them, words that were somehow disconnected from their meaning, as if he stood on an island and those words lay stranded on another, a void between them that allowed him to scratch those symbols on that page, all while those flashes appeared before him, slowly syphoned into that void, the distance between those images and him the same as the distance he felt when he looked down at his hands - his own hands, that, in his memory, started out as someone else’s. He realized he had already started detaching himself from the situation long before his own voluntary intervention.</p>
<p>The gun was suddenly in those hands, hands that both belonged to him and were detached from him all at once. A shot resounded, reverberated, or was it only an echo? A scream, a shout, two guns, no three, or perhaps four? The explosion drudged from somewhere in those neural circuits, the chemicals, the blue couch, the childhood faces, the faces he had been seeing every day since starting his job, looking forward at the car ahead, no backward, at the car following in pursuit. Three guns, multiple explosions. Or was it an echo? A shot, a shot, a shot.</p>
<p>He scrawled words out frantically, ignoring the faded red margins in the journal, tainting the binding and consecutive sheets that clumped against the edges of his current page. “Cars,” “struggle,” “gun,” “memorosurgeon,” “boy,” then crossed out next to “girl,” and then another line through it. His journal - an externality that contained more of his memories than he would allow himself, though, once torn from the seams, would end up existing in different landfills, in different rivers and lakes, floating on the breeze in different towns, different cities. Memories becoming an externality that, though torn from himself the same way the pages were torn from the journal, still existed somewhere. As if that somehow justified the system of martyrdom and memorosurgery, that the whole of him still existed in the world, even if the whole wasn’t pieced together. In an age when “complete” didn’t matter, as long as the parts still existed somewhere in the world, in a society where, though total deletion was deemed immoral, scattered remnants justified the practice linked with the glove; the potential for the whole still existing within the fragments of the minds of as many human beings as there were memories. </p>
<p>But he owned a glove, and there was no one to mandate its “proper” usage. His journal was his only participation in that human stipulated morality.</p>
<p>He fumbled around for his key, the drawer, the next page, leaned over his desk, its busted leg rocking with his dead weight, and he cursed himself for only ever fixing it with a rolled up piece of cardboard under the uneven leg. He needed to get out of Portland, needed advise the man that he would be after tearing away this memory, needed to dictate the next move: “LEAVE PORTLAND,” he scrawled out in all caps, his letters twirling round, twisting with one another, his vision faltering with the pen equipped in his hand.</p>
<p>The best decisions were never made intoxicated. But he couldn’t handle the memory. The scream harmonized with the gun shot, like a beat that flits around in one’s mind, a beat that merges with the hum of the air conditioner, with the pots and pans clanging in the apartment next door, with the mother’s voice calling her children together for dinner. He wanted to call the cops, say that he’d heard gunshots next door, that he’d heard children screaming, that the gunshots continued, the screaming wouldn’t stop. But his bloodied hands reminded him he shouldn’t, and he scratched out a few words, and instead, instructed himself not to call the police, not to alert authorities, signaled that somehow, they were part of the problem. He wouldn’t let himself write the reason on that second page and instead, wrote that he should just get whatever job he might find that pays in tokens, rent an apartment from a landlord that didn’t ask too many questions.   </p>
<p>Without turning the page back, he ripped out the first one he wrote on, the one littered with a thousand words; words that smeared into one another; words that detailed the events of the cars, the screams, the guns; words encapsulating a moment in time that he would never view again; the act of writing only commemorative if there is a memory of the writing. But he assured himself that even that would disappear, that soon the screams would cease, those flashes of faces, of hands, would vanish. </p>
<p>He closed his notebook, placed the ripped page in his top desk drawer, locked it, then took the key and his drink to the window. It didn’t matter where he threw it; he wouldn’t remember it anyway. He took another drink and fumbled with the latch. Damn motor movements that can’t feel as well, damn his eyesight, his judgements as to how hard to press on the frame. He leaned on the sill. He could fall out. Eight stories up. A fall like that would wipe his memory, no glove needed. He knew he wasn’t in his right mind, still had that sense enough. And then there was Elli. </p>
<p>He threw the key as far as his motions would allow. Then he downed the liquor, slid on his glove, placed his hand on his right temple, and fell onto his bed.</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0002"><h2>2. Echo</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>A pounding in his head woke him, along with the spilling of his bedside glass of water as he grasped for his ibuprofen bottle. Cursing, he sat up, more acutely aware of the throbbing in his head, and he up righted the glass before swiping tissues from the box to soak up the mess. A sick feeling emanated from his chest to his stomach, and he doubted that it was only because of his consumption the night before. He wanted to vomit, thinking it might purge him of the feeling, but more than anything, he wanted to keep down those painkillers, at least until they entered the bloodstream. </p>
<p>What worried him most was that he couldn’t remember much of the previous day – apart from driving to work and meeting Dr. Seymour at the lab, the man passing him a manilla folder that he remembered opening, its contents now blank, white pages that he turned over and thumbed through, scanning his eyes over as if something of meaning resided on those clean sheets. Then there was a void. And then he was walking through his front door, cursing the shoes he had left on the inside mat as he stumbled over them, fumbling for the light, trembling for the glass in his cupboard, the bottle in his pantry, downing the first shot before changing out of his clothes, careful to lift the shirt so it wouldn’t drag against his hands that, in his memory, appeared as a blurry mass of tan and red. He looked down at his own hands now, resting on his knees whose joints hinged over the side of his bed. Scratches that had been cleaned ran over his flesh, at least eight scabs that had clotted during the night, blue and purple bruises trailing over his knuckles. He ran his fingers over them, now more aware of the urge to vomit. </p>
<p>It was a feeling he couldn’t say he was a virgin to; there’d been many nights after which he’d been reprimanded at the lab for not knowing something without looking it up, after he’d gotten into a fight with Sarah about something petty, and he had just wanted to forget those things so that he could go back to work without resentment or so that they could avoid a breakup. </p>
<p>But this time, he was shaking; this time, he was aware that there was more missing from his glass bottle than usual; this time, he was curious about the writing left in his journal, the way curiosity overtakes fear even amidst the sense of danger, when the threat is yet unknown. </p>
<p>He looked over at his desk, aware that it was already past seven, aware that even if he raced to dress and stashed a granola bar in his bag, he’d still be late for work. But his eyes remained on the journal that lay closed and placed beside an empty glass, a glass whose contents had been downed by a Zach he would never make contact with, a Zach that had been discarded with the past. </p>
<p>His trance drew him to it, and he leafed through its contents, paragraphs and sketches flipped briskly until he reached a page with giant letters and with a seam before it, the remnants of which were littered with the beginnings of words he would never read. His feelings were confirmed when he read the words on the intact page twice, three times. He wouldn’t need to worry about being late to work, about babbling for an excuse to give Dr. Seymour, not this day, and, from the mandate by his past self, not ever again.</p>
<p>A gunshot sent him reeling backward, swerving into his blue couch. Hands that started out as someone else’s reached up to clutch his face, to catch tears that spilled out as blood, to hide the blood on the tile, the tile that somehow merged with the loop carpet in the passenger seat, hands that clawed away at someone else’s, first in front of his, then behind. </p>
<p>A scream. The shrill tore into mind, reverberating against the pounding, wrenching the images from him, masking them, merging with them. </p>
<p>He gasped, blinking, his sore throat now revealing that the scream came from him.       </p>
<p>He reached for his phone, quickly sent out his resignation email, turned off his notifications, then thumbed a string of ten digits. </p>
<p>When the woman on the other end answered, Zach composed himself to an extent, though blurted out, “I quit.”</p>
<p>“What? Hello?”</p>
<p>“Sarah, I’ll be right over.” </p>
<p>“Wait, who-”</p>
<p>***</p>
<p>When he arrived at her apartment, he reached out to the doorbell he usually never had to press. She’d always be waiting for him or would have left the door open while she was taking the casserole out of the oven or looking after the boiling pot on the stove, turning it to low so she could greet him when he let himself in. </p>
<p>He didn’t let the thought that something might be wrong linger in his mind. </p>
<p>The woman opened the door, barring his entrance with it and her body. </p>
<p>“Sarah,” he sputtered, “I don’t know what happened.” Even as he said the words, he winced, as if readying himself for the incipient scolding she always gave him when she found out he used the glove on himself. </p>
<p>“I’m sorry, I tried to tell you,” she said, but his rambling cut through her words.</p>
<p>“There’s a scream, a terrible scream. I think a kid was involved. I just didn’t know what to do. I sent in my resignation this morning. Well, aren’t you going to let me in?” His words lingered, hanging in front of her, waiting for her response, and in those moments, he was able to look at her. Even when they were making love, he always looked beyond her - at those shelves, those succulents, that blue and white tin, the cat watching them in the doorway - taking more interest in studying the lines and curves of those objects than the woman above him. She never seemed to mind, her gaze always on his lips, his chest, his ears, his cheeks, never his eyes. Had he really been so focused on all those other objects that he never noticed that birthmark on the side of her eye? Had he even used his glove to-? He didn’t let himself finish the thought, instead catching the door as he let out a nervous chuckle. “Sarah, stop looking at me like that.”</p>
<p>“I’m sorry, but,” her words came out sharp, tearing into his mind like the wires in his gloves, like the scream, like the gunshot, no, gunshots, the flashes of images and sounds threatening to send him reeling away, swerving, his firmly planted feet preventing him from swaying too widely, “I don’t know you.” The words mixed with those screams, those explosions, those images of hands and arms and flailing feet. Had his glove not reached deep enough, not found the source of the neural pathway that held that memory? Flashes that should have been banished with the page he ripped out. </p>
<p>The woman pushed the door to close it. He could see the shelves over her television, the little ceramic white rabbit he bought for her after she told him it was her favorite animal, the string of lights shaped like seashells that hung over her bedroom door that they had stepped through a thousand times while kissing, clasping each other’s cheeks, ears, necks. He reassured himself with those objects, knowing that they existed in his past, that he had existed in their present. </p>
<p>Forgetting was something she knew not to joke about with a resident memorosurgeon, something she even tried to prevent him from developing into a habit. She knew this was the cruelest way to break up with him. He thought about forcing the door open, he knew he was strong enough, but when her brow furrowed with pity and her mouth screwed into a grimace, he stopped himself. </p>
<p>All that was left for him now was his note.</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0003"><h2>3. Tattooed Hands</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>The delivery truck pulled into the overflow lot of the barn-converted tavern, its neon signs flashing different colors over oak timber planks - blue, green, and red flames contained in their reflections against the siding. Two men sat in rocking chairs beneath the awning, puffing out smoke that lit up every time the signs flashed. A bull terrier begged for scraps at their heels, sniffing every time ash fell from their cigarettes. Zach pet the dog on the way in. He’d remember to bring him part of the bun from his burger as he left. </p>
<p>Inside, he took a seat at the counter, two stools away from a man with hands as smooth and clean as his own back when he worked his old job. When the knife the smooth hands used to cut their steak pressed against the flesh of the fingers, Zach cringed. He was with an older man in a gray suit, top blouse button undone, and his jacket open. His hands would have been just as nice if they were not dappled with the spots and crinkles of age. At first, the two might have been mistaken for father and son, for a late-night dinner after each had finished with work and their wives were tucking their children in bed. If it weren’t for the hands. </p>
<p>Zach ordered a burger and a beer – canned – the only kind his delivery job could sustain over long periods of time. He’d already had to downsize his apartment to a studio, but the cabin of his truck seemed ever more welcoming every first of the month. At least he owned the truck outright – his last big purchase since the ocular implants he bought for his grandmother when her sight started deteriorating. She was so excited about seeing him graduate from memorology school. But amnesia is the one thing they haven’t been able to combat, other than constantly pumping memories through the neural circuits.</p>
<p>Some sport competed for his attention on the screen above him, but Zach was more interested in his fries and whether or not the ketchup bottle would last until he was finished eating. He hadn’t cared about sports since getting kicked off the soccer team after he was caught smoking.  </p>
<p>A man in a beard and flannel reached over the two empty seats to get another beer. Zach’s dirty face and windblown shaggy hair wouldn’t raise an eyebrow for the fellow truck driver. But those two a few seats away from him, those hands, might. </p>
<p>“That’s a nice meal for someone who hasn’t worked a day in his life.” </p>
<p>At first, the four smooth hands didn’t move from their food, and their eyes didn’t leave their plates. </p>
<p>“What you all doing in a place like this? Portland wasn’t good enough for you?”</p>
<p>The hands stopped cutting their steaks but still held onto their knives. </p>
<p>“Hey, Mike, you should see their hands. Never worked a day in their lives.”</p>
<p>The younger hands ignored the trucker’s insults, but the older pair refused to let the man harass his apprentice. “Excuse me, we had business in town with a patient.”</p>
<p>“Must be nice havin’ a fancy job that doesn’t require hard labor. But stores still need to get stocked. How you think that steak got here?”</p>
<p>The four soft hands said nothing. </p>
<p>“Patient? You a doctor? Maybe a shrink. Most surgeons’ hands are dried out from all their washing. I bet you’re a memorosurgeon, that right?”</p>
<p>Those hands. Zach knew. That was the only job they could have. </p>
<p>“You know, you’re the reason this country is doomed. You’re all gonna brainwash us, wipe our memories. You’re the reason we have those memory witches.”</p>
<p>“Shut up.” Zach took a bite of one of his fries. He wasn’t especially angry about the slur regarding the Aberrants - it was true that genetic code had mutated in response to memorosurgery - the unlucky few who developed a Brand on their wrist in a mark slightly resembling an eye, who could dig deep into minds without needing a glove, could change, not merely delete, rework memories, to bend them to their own will, to manipulate, to control. He understood the fear of the memory witches. But saying it was the memorosurgeons’ fault?  </p>
<p>The trucker turned to him. “Oh? Whose side you on, kid? People like them, sapping all the medical funding, sitting on their asses all day, helping people commit suicide.” </p>
<p>“Suicide?” The word was thrown around so carelessly now. “That might be the only thing keeping people from suicide.”</p>
<p>“People like that, maybe it’d be better if they actually did. It’s people like us who have to pay their hospital and rehab bills. Better off without them. ”</p>
<p>Zach’s fist was out before he could anchor himself to the present moment, knocking into the trucker’s left eye, sending him backward into his friend’s arms. <br/>The soft hands stood up. </p>
<p>When the man recoiled, he threw a right hook at Zach’s gut, then a left at his cheek. Zach fell, blood drooling out of his mouth on the hardwood floor. Each drip like Hollis’s, whose body he found too late on the white bathroom floor tile. Sometimes memories are the only way to stop the pain; sometimes pain is the only way to stop the memories. His head whirled round, swimming with an alarm that matched that of the ambulance he called that night, crying over his whiskey and a note stained in red splotches. His birthday was in another month. Full adult - according to the system. But Elli - who lay sleeping in her Unicorn Sparkle Princess bed, teddy bear shaped nightlight plugged in, white noise machine droning on - wouldn’t be an adult for twelve years. And people asked him how he ended up drinking at such an early age. Though, he supposed, the habit began even before that night. </p>
<p>He struggled on his hands and knees, thinking that Elli was still safely tucked in somewhere, somewhere beyond the booming music, beyond those four soft hands, beyond the man daring him to stand. His knuckles were red and swollen, the streaks of scars that healed months ago now dappled with the blood oozing from his mouth, as if they were fresh wounds. </p>
<p>Peering down at them, he grappled around, tearing at velvet and loop carpet that, a moment ago, had been hard wood flooring. He gasped, thinking there were two men in front of him, both armed; he needed to knock one unconscious. But the hands in front of him suddenly were no longer his own, they belonged to someone else, someone whose index finger hovered over the trigger.</p>
<p>“Hey, Prince of Denmark,” said a slow voice that roused him from his dream, and he rose from the wood floor, now conscious that his hands no longer held a weapon and that his hands were again his own. The drawl was so slow Zach could tell the man had been smoking. When he looked up, wiping the blood away from his lip, he saw it was a man about his own age with tattoos cascading over his arms and onto his hands. Wouldn’t that hurt his fingers? </p>
<p>“Heh, I’ll buy you another beer,” the man said. “Got a cigarette too.” He looked over at Zach, shook his messy light brown hair out of his eyes and winked at him. Then he pressed a freshly opened bottle into the trucker’s hands, and when the belligerent man walked away, the younger man stood with his tattooed hands in his pockets until the trucker took a seat. “You alright?” He gave Zach one of those tattoo-covered hands. A little blood over the ink wouldn’t interfere too much with the shapes and animal faces sketched into each finger. “Miles. Miles McIntire.”</p>
<p>“Zach. Morales.” </p>
<p>Miles pressed his thumb into Zach’s chin, wiping away the excess blood then lifting beneath to get a better look at his face. “Maybe better not mess with a guy who’s ’ad more to drink ’an you.” Zach turned his face away. The man was endearing. Clearly high, wasted. “Tune ‘em out, heh?”</p>
<p>Zach took a breath, held it for a few seconds, then breathed out, his attention following it until all the air was out of his lungs, guiding the dream away from his consciousness. </p>
<p>Miles shook a glass, quarter filled with amber liquid, in front of his face, swirling it round until the liquid dribbled down the side. “’sides, they’re chill.” His messy hair flicked in the direction of the surgeons. His face seemed familiar and unfamiliar all at once, the way one finds beauty in something similar, in recognizable patterns, in being able to pin curves and colors and contours to people you’ve known, loved before, but also in the way that one finds beauty in something unique, abstract, something wild, unknowable, something beyond the reach of any memory. </p>
<p>Zach took the glass, shyly looking away for fear he had been looking too long. He hadn’t planned on drinking anything hard. But it would numb the pain and suppress the memories. And it seemed like the tattooed man was paying.</p>
<p>“Woah, slow down, man. Glass doesn’t have a leak.” He took a sip. “So, you a trucker too?”</p>
<p>“Just recently.”</p>
<p>The man had that sort of abstract beauty people don’t recognize at first, like those works of art that hung in the museums where he used to take Sarah when she felt like she couldn’t paint anymore. The works that, at first, he was adverse to; ones that, with their slanting, squiggly lines and bold colors, contrasted against the pale pastels amidst the canvases of all the other works on the walls, seemed too radical, out of place. And yet, that aversion always drew Zach in, and, looking longer, expanding the duration of his perception, he’d always find something more beautiful in that work than any other on display, solely because there was nothing identifiable in it, because he couldn’t ground it in, couldn’t link it to, anything he’d ever seen before: unknown. </p>
<p>“Coulda guessed. Word gets around. Truckers look out for one another, heh?” He laughed. “But he was so wasted, he won’t remember tomorrow.”</p>
<p>Zach tried to keep his gaze on the drink in front of him. “Wish I could say the same.”</p>
<p>Miles smiled at him over the rim of his glass. “Well, drink up, my man.”</p>
<p>The two took a long draught as the four soft hands left. The older surgeon laid a hand on Zach’s shoulder as a gesture of thanks, then looked him in the eyes and dropped his gaze to the floor as an apology. </p>
<p>Zach shook his head. “Not like they go around ridding people of memories without asking. And the monastics are all volunteers, right?”</p>
<p>“Sure.” Miles set down his empty glass. “Want to hit up another bar with me? Maybe you’ll find a girl, or, I don’t know, a guy, if you’re into that?” </p>
<p>Zach chuckled, and though tipsy, he became aware of a slight warming in his cheeks. He peered over at the tattooed hands still clutching the glass on the counter. What looked like a snake coiled round his index finger but as he looked further down the man’s knuckle, he could see a furry mane of a creature with small ears and an open mouth with fangs. “I only brought my truck.” </p>
<p>“I’ll drive.”</p>
<p>“Can you?” Zach asked, eyeing the empty glass.</p>
<p>Miles laughed. “Just be going down the street. Besides, it’s a Volvo Sedan.”</p>
<p>“Living on the edge, right?”</p>
<p>Miles patted him on the back. “That’s my man, heh.”</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0004"><h2>4. Beyond</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Zach gave the bull terrier his leftover fries as they went out, and when Miles commented it was a sweet gesture, Zach struggled for where to place his eyes, his consciousness already melding judgement and automatic thoughts. Like the swirls of color on those paintings, Zach was drawn to the unfamiliar man the same way he was drawn to those works of art, couldn’t leave them, even when Sarah tugged his arm, pulling him toward a picture of a lady in a lowcut black dress and pearl necklace. The paintings that ensnared his attention were untamed, in opposition to the color wheel, blues and reds and yellows pouring over the edges as if the canvases displayed were only half the works, strokes swept in disparate directions like a wildfire that licks across the land without a care for the life beneath its destructive arm, all the critics in tailored and ironed white and black suits with their champagne glasses never allowing their eyes more than a moment’s glance, the work always replaced by another work within the week. And though Zach always wanted to look away, there was something that held his gaze - the way that the painting that gave him a feeling he at first identified as revulsion became a feeling recognized as affinity, enchantment; as the breath, the eyes, become transfixed by the estranged, the beautiful; the way the man leading him to his car gave him a feeling he at first could not identify, one that compelled him to look longer, if only to figure out what that feeling was. </p>
<p>“Just gotta clear off the passenger seat.” He took a lighter out of his pocket and a pack of Mayfairs. “Want one?”</p>
<p>Zach nodded, taking one between his two fingers, and Miles lit it before lighting his own. </p>
<p>The tattooed man rummaged through his old car, cigarette between his lips, ash dripping onto the seat as he hurled wrappers and paper bags onto the backseat. “Always on the road, heh.”</p>
<p>“Don’t have a girl?” </p>
<p>“Would I be trashing my backseat if I did?” He laughed. “Girls come and go for me. Haven’t wanted to commit to one, heh? But what’s the point if they forget you the next day?” He motioned to the open passenger seat.</p>
<p>“You ever, uh, gave up a memory?” Zach asked, buckling as Miles plopped down in the driver’s seat and tilted his mirror. </p>
<p>The tattooed fingers laughed. “Is there anyone nowadays who hasn’t? But all I have is the bill.”</p>
<p>“Was it insured?”</p>
<p>“Huh?”</p>
<p>“Might help you figure out what kind of memory it was.”</p>
<p>Miles started the car and pulled out, his arm over Zach’s seat as he peered over his shoulder at the rear window. “I gave it up, right? Must ‘a had a good reason.” He turned on the radio. Or was it his CD? The window cracked and his fingers tapped the cigarette, ash spiraling backwards at 45 miles an hour. “What about you?”</p>
<p>Zach turned toward his window and breathed in through the instrument between his fingers. “Uh, yeah.” His vision blurred, or was it clearer? There were some fingerprints on the glass, and in that moment, they were the only things that spoke to him; they must have told him to trust the stranger. “Actually, I used to be a surgeon.”</p>
<p>“No shit! A memorosurgeon?” Zach nodded, still not looking at him. “Damn, I bet you get a lot of action.”</p>
<p>“I had a girlfriend for a while. But we broke up when I stopped working.”</p>
<p>“I bet the pay was sick. Why’d you quit?”</p>
<p>“I’m,” Zach opened his window and tapped his cigarette, “not entirely sure. Used to live in Portland too. Just have a note to myself that gives me a bad feeling about it all.”</p>
<p>“Heh, so you’re a mystery even to yourself.”</p>
<p>“Our minds are all pretty fucked up lately, huh?”</p>
<p>“Uh, yeah.” His words slurred, spiraling out of the window with the ash. He pulled his right arm off the wheel, swiveled his wrist a few times with the cigarette in his hand until he laid it on the seat next to him, palm facing down. </p>
<p>Zach looked over at it, and when he did, Miles drew it back and placed it on the steering wheel again. “Tiger?” said Zach, eyeing the ink covering his fingers. </p>
<p>“Wolf. Got any?”</p>
<p>Turning toward the window again, Zach wished he could down another drink. Where was that bar? He inhaled through his cigarette instead. “Nah, certain standards in my old field.” </p>
<p>“Well, you can change that now, heh? Here we are.”</p>
<p>Miles pulled into a parking spot in front of the building, and they climbed the stairs and waded through the crowd to enter the bar. Every time the soft hands resurfaced in Zach’s mind, he thought of his bruised, bloody fists, then of his glove. The drink and the smoke suppressed those thoughts a bit, but with each passing moment, he felt more conscious. Or perhaps unconscious? He stumbled toward the bar. “Nikka whiskey, straight.” He held up two fingers. </p>
<p>Miles leaned against the counter, finishing the last of his cigarette. “Kick, my man.” He turned for an ash tray and smothered it amongst the other dozen butts. “What is up, heh? Oh, meet,” he paused, turning to Zach and placing an arm round his shoulder as the bar tender passed them both a glass. “Zach.”</p>
<p>The man stood half a head taller than Miles, arms folded across his chest. But his knuckles looked strong. Zach supposed he was another truck driver. He looked Zach over with a smile. “Miles and I used to date.”</p>
<p>Zach swallowed hard, the bitter liquid catching in his throat. “H-hunh?”</p>
<p>Miles pulled Zach closer with his grasp. “Well, I leveled up, didn’t I?” The two old friends stared at each other a moment, then Miles burst out laughing, “Ha! We’re not dating! Zach, this is Kick. I’ve known him since I first started.”</p>
<p>“So, did you guys really-?” He felt awkward asking somehow. His eyes moved to the rubber strap hanging loosely round Kick’s wrist, the same kind, same color, as the one worn by the boy from his high school days, now ten years ago. The one who was always drunk or high outside of school, the one who girls and boys flocked to, begged to be invited to his parties, to have him at their parties, his dyed black hair highlighted with shades of auburn. Everyone knew he was into both girls and boys. The football players were afraid of him, seeing him as a threat, all while they secretly eyed him when he changed into his gym t-shirt in the locker room. Zach had a hard time admitting he had done so himself, his locker only four away from the boy’s, who clapped his hand with that rubber bracelet on the back of his friend as he laughed and undressed completely, before even putting on an article of clothing from his locker, all while Zach huddled closer to his locker, replacing his shirt before taking care of another piece of clothing, not because he was ashamed of his body but because somehow, it always felt weird to undress before men. When they emerged from the locker room, the hair dyed teen would call Zach over with his eyes scrunched up into a smile and say, “Give me a hug,” pull him into him and laugh, “You’re so cute.” And Zach would pull away, wondering why his face felt hot. He had tried not to think about it anymore - until Kick’s rubber strap reminded him of those years ago, when he was a teenager, when Elli still lived with him, when Hollis and his parents were still alive. </p>
<p>Zach looked down at the hands next to him, a thick leather strap covering its wrist and a good portion of the black and green ink vines curling round it. The hand reached for his pocket, a cigarette, and lighter. “Naw.”</p>
<p>“Not my type,” said Kick, laughing as he pushed Miles gently. </p>
<p>“Heh.” Miles’s thumb brushed his chin before finishing the liquid in his cup. Zach was hardly aware that he was also mirroring the gesture, sipping from his glass. There was something somber in the laugh. </p>
<p>The music boomed and Miles went off somewhere, beyond the calls from across the room, the cheers ringing out, the clanging glass bottles, the man laughing and falling into the table then getting clapped on the back, recoiling before stumbling again. Staring somewhere, beyond the glass, beyond the leather on his wrist, and beyond the cheap metal wrapped round his fingers. Zach felt it too, being pulled beyond, wondering where the tattooed man’s gaze was taking him, further than the bitter aftertaste, further than the hundred decibel base, further than the cool edges of the glass, the rough, splintered edges of the wood countertop, further than the smell of smoke and cinnamon whiskey, further than the bar tender swaying in front of him from one patron to the next.   </p>
<p>“Damn protesters,” Kick said, setting down his drink, the pound resounding in undulation, rousing Miles from his dreamworld, back to the world where everyone’s perceptions were blurred by multifarious substances, to the world that wouldn’t be remembered in the morning. “Blocked my path for a drop off.” </p>
<p>“Which side?” Miles asked, mustering something of a grin. </p>
<p>“Didn’t look. Like, I don’t care what people do with their memories, but let me do my job, you know?”</p>
<p>“It gets illegal, that makes our side jobs harder.”</p>
<p>“Might make the price of merchandise skyrocket.” Kick swirled his drink. </p>
<p>Zach peered into his glass, suddenly wishing he were in his living room peering at the same liquid, with the porch door open, television on some comedy he could zone out to but whose talking would keep him from swirling in his own thoughts, that would drown his inner voice with theirs and chase away those haunting memories. And if that didn’t work, he could down his drink and lay on his bed and cleave off those memories with his glove pressed to his skull, ebbing one away at a time, until he’d finally fall asleep, having no more memories to resurface. </p>
<p>Were they really admitting to selling memories on the black market? He sipped awkwardly, his eyes roaming for a place to fix so that he wouldn’t have to engage in their conversation. Talk of protesters made him uneasy, he wasn’t sure what side he was on, and if Kick found out he was a memorosurgeon, things could get ugly. </p>
<p>Miles’s arm wrapped round Zach’s shoulder, and he sputtered awkwardly at the contact.</p>
<p>“You good, man? Looks like you could use another.” He turned toward Kick, arm still dangling round Zach’s neck. “Got into a fight, this one. Heh.”</p>
<p>Zach forced a laugh and struggled inwardly with how to react to the touch, wondering if he should lean into it, reach up and grab the tattooed hand, or shirk it off. The drink made him blush, and he was somehow conscious of this, though also aware that the dark atmosphere would conceal it, and when Miles ordered him another drink, he eagerly accepted and downed it just as anxiously. </p>
<p>“Careful,” said Kick, laughing. “Seems like a lightweight.”</p>
<p>Zach did his best to mirror their reactions, and he was swept away in the motions of Miles’s grandiose gestures, waving his hands wildly as he talked about his day of deliveries, something about a dog without a leash or fence, then of a puppy, something about his father, a younger boy, glowing orbs, a Christmas present, eating snow, and flashing red and blue lights that cast purple on the white ground. He wanted to pay attention, nodded and sipped and tapped his fingers on the counter as if he was. But the words weaved together, pulled back over and through one another, twisted and curled round one another, knotted, clipped and tied one another. The tapestry that had been spun with words now a mess of images disrupted from chronology the way those flashes of images - of hands and faces and flailing arms and feet, of short brown hair that flickered long, of screams and explosions - twisted and curled over and round one another before his hands flickered before him, then before someone else. </p>
<p>After a while, Miles looked sympathetically at Zach, nodded at him and said something with a raised inflection, then turned back to Kick and, while holding Zach by the shoulder, pounded his tattooed fist to the other man’s. </p>
<p>When they walked to the door, Zach relied heavily on the other man whose small frame supported Zach’s. Fiddles and guitars and pianos filled Miles’s old car as he passed Zach another cigarette and babbled on about campfires and siblings and thick red trees. Sempervirens. The word, being new to him, resounded in Zach’s head until it was the only he heard as he stared at those tattooed hands clasping the stirring wheel, being cradled in wide black leather wristbands with straps and buckles and silver fasteners. “Sempervirens.” Even in Zach’s mind the word echoed in Miles’s voice.<br/>
“Here’s fine,” Zach managed to say as they pulled into the lot of the tavern where they met. </p>
<p>“Alright, man,” Zach remembered Miles saying. “Gimme a holler if you wanna do this again!” </p>
<p>Zach stumbled toward his truck. There was no way he was driving back to his apartment nor was he willing to call a ride. His cabin was just as sufficient a place to crash in his stupor as any, much better than those stone walls next to the harbor where he used to fall asleep when he couldn’t make it back home or if Sarah refused to share her carpool after getting angry with him for kissing a strange girl at the bar. He waved back at Miles whose headlights were just now trailing away. Miles didn’t seem as inebriated as Zach, though Zach supposed it might have had something to do with the weed. It had been a while since he smoked the substance, since starting his residency at the clinic, he usually stuck to substances that weren’t as easily traced in his system. And he also had the luxury of erasing unwanted memories without having to resort to the use of any drug. </p>
<p>Walking round the back of the truck, he stopped, teetering on his uneasy footing, and stopping when he noticed the abnormality. Had he forgotten to close the back? He was never usually so careless, at least when he was sober. But work had been grueling that day: an elderly woman refused to accept a package from her son, insisting that she had no children, and worse, she wouldn’t sign his delivery form. But would that really have led to him to leave his cargo open to the customers of a trucker bar?</p>
<p>He needed to make sure nothing was stolen. </p>
<p>A crackling noise split through the air and then a hard thump. It was enough to send a wave of sobriety over him, his mind fighting back the tendency to lean into the drink’s effects as he might lean into the call of sleep after a twelve-hour shift at the clinic. And yet, that soft cushion still called to him at the edge of his mind somewhere - beckoning him to give back into the drink, to relent in fighting off whatever was in the back of his truck, that it would be so much better to just surrender, even if that surrender meant a release from ever being conscious again. But there was still a rational part of him that had not been submerged, and he thanked himself for not having another shot when Miles put that last one in front of him. What had happened to it? He didn’t see Miles take it. Maybe he gave it to Kick? Had he really been so drunk that he blacked out? Would he even remember this later? Somehow, he supposed that if he was conscious enough to ask these questions, if he was remembering little things now, he would. Still, he needed to listen to that rational voice in him. Or, perhaps “rational” wasn’t the word. Just willingness to survive. </p>
<p>The streetlights revealed an outline of a human form amidst his cargo.</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0005"><h2>5. Elli</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>The human silhouette appeared hunched over, holding something in one hand and something else beneath the arm. The object in the hand crackled. Some kind of wrapper. </p><p>“The hell?” Even Zach’s voice didn’t sound angry; usually never was an angry drunk, and for that, he was thankful. He never cared enough, never had anything to care enough about. No memory was permanent. There was nothing anyone could do or say to him that he couldn’t just make disappear. He blinked, the survivalist inside beckoning him to sound threatening, that his life depended on it. </p><p>The form stood up. Or at least it looked like it did. It was not the full size of a human being. At first, Zach thought it was some sort of strange creature. It reminded him of those wendigos in the horror movies he used to watch when he still lived with Hollis and Elli - the beasts that hunched over their prey as they ate but could never draw themselves up to full size. </p><p>He reached for his pocket. Then he remembered he left his glove on the passenger seat, locked away where his drunken self couldn’t lose it. </p><p>“H-hey,” he said, fumbling for the light switch. The being already started clattering around, pushing through boxes to escape. He braced himself, widening his arm span, determined to catch the creature before it fled. But maybe that was a bit too optimistic for a drunk.</p><p>The light flashed on, and he perceived that the being was small. A kid. Only slightly older than Elli the last time he saw her, by the looks of it. The boy’s matted hair hung in his face and bits of crumbs clung to his lips and chin. In his hand, he held a half-eaten pastry from the Happy Loaves box, several wrappers also littered beneath his feet. Under his arm he held a silky stuffed elephant, still branded with the Plushers tag in its ear, a cardboard box with Toy Town’s logo ripped open. </p><p>The boy blinked at him, his brown eyes lingering in his gaze just a bit longer than natural. Zach knew that after about four seconds, holding eye contact gets awkward. He judged it to be longer than that. Unless the drink obscured his perception of duration. </p><p>No, it was a look of recognition, like one of those looks when, in the moment, he knows he should look away, but, seeing something familiar in that person, gazes just a little bit longer to judge if it’s true. “Zach,” said the boy. And then Zach looked even longer. </p><p>There was a scream, and Zach felt like he was whirling backwards, thrust by the sudden turn in the vehicle, spiraling out of control, feet, arms, fists, flailing. At first, he was in the car pursuing another, then in the car being pursued, looking down at hands that felt foreign, hands with scratches, hands that curled round a trigger. A shot, an echo, a reverberation undulating until he couldn’t identify where it came from - his memory from a few years ago or months, or from the present moment?   </p><p>The boy charged toward the door, Zach grasping him in his arms. It was all he could do to keep from falling over, the previous moment already slipping from his consciousness. “You gonna pay for that?” The boy writhed and moaned as Zach grappled for the stuffed toy. The pastry toppled over the back of the truck and rolled onto the ground. </p><p>“There you are,” came a voice, deeper this time. Definitely not the whining kid. </p><p>The boy pushed his hands against Zach’s chest, thrusting himself away, dropping the stuffed elephant. </p><p>Then the boy stopped running. </p><p>Zach looked up and saw an older man in a button-down shirt tucked into tailored jeans. He was holding a gun. </p><p>Instinctively, Zach threw up his hands, hands that belonged to him, hands that embodied a memory of holding the same type of weapon. </p><p>The man cocked the gun at the boy and started toward him. The boy turned the opposite direction and started running. A shot fired and the boy fell on the ground, it tore through Zach’s mind, stirring moments in it that had been similar, that reminded him of the sound. A shot, a shot, a shot. </p><p>“Hey!” Zach yelled, this time sounding angry. </p><p>The man walked over to the boy and picked him up while he kicked and screamed. </p><p>“Hey! Put him down!” Zach said. That man was not his father. Father’s don’t shoot at their sons. At least not most.</p><p>“Don’t fight me, boy,” the man said, trying to manage both his gun and the kid. </p><p>Zach hadn’t been called “boy” in a long time. He would be twenty-seven in a few months; did he really look young enough to be called “boy”? He thought it must be his clean-shaven face. It was a developed habit after working as a resident. There were certain standards for the job. Even though there were never any incisions, memorosurgeons with heavy facial hair only raised eyebrows. Zach instinctively felt his chin, the drink pulsing through his veins causing him to only have one distinct thought at a time.   </p><p>“Shut up, will you?” the man spat, trying to get a tight enough grip on the gun to smash it against the boy’s forehead. </p><p>The screaming in the present moment shook Zach from his daydream. “P-put him down!” He stumbled forward and cursed himself for drinking so much.</p><p>The man laughed. “Don’t try to fight drunk.” His face was blurred. But perhaps it was only because he couldn’t remember it afterward. Perception is, after all, based on memory, and like a palace, if the cornerstone is swept away by an alcoholic current, then no foundation can be laid, no image retained. </p><p>The boy’s face was clear: red cheeks, tears streaming down them, dark brown eyes that flickered open and close. He saw Elli. A child crying, brown hair sticking to their face, arms hitting - not a person - the floor. Pounding and pounding until the bottom of the fist bruised and the fingers could clamp no more. </p><p>Zach charged at the man. “Let him go!” he said forcing his weight into him. He couldn’t land a hook; he could barely see the man, or at least remember him long enough to lay the base of one memory from one second to the next. His weight was the only weapon he had. </p><p>“Idiot!” the man cried out, catching his balance. “There’s a bounty on his head.”</p><p>The man toppled over, Zach on top of him, the boy scrambling from his clutches. </p><p>“Fine, I’ll give you half!”</p><p>The man pushed Zach back and rolled over, grabbing his fallen gun. He aimed at the running boy.</p><p>No. </p><p>Not Elli. </p><p>Zach smacked his fist into something hard. His jaw? Then his own back slammed into the pavement, forcing him to spit blood. Again, he cursed his drinking habits. The man curled his fingers and dove for his eye. Zach spun over on the ground, death calling sweetly to him again. To not have to fight. To not have to stay awake. To not have to remember the kid, Elli, Hollis, to not have to remember those flailing arms and feet, those detached hands, whatever it was he wrote in his notebook before throwing away the key, whatever the reason he left Portland and his residency. Death was so much easier. Total surrender.</p><p>Zach reached for the gun. The man drew his foot up and thrust it across his nose and mouth. More blood to spit out. </p><p>“No one will ever know you were out here.” The man gripped his hands round Zach’s neck. He wanted to vomit - blood and bile and whiskey and that undercooked burger. He thought of the dog who was probably licking his lips after his fries right now, begging those two men in the rockers for something extra. It made him think of Sarah’s cat - Bella? Baylee? Bayleaf? Everything was so hard to remember. Maybe she’d get a phone call about Zach’s death. She’d answer and say she didn’t know who that was, that they must have the wrong number.</p><p>Maybe he wouldn’t even be found. Bounty hunters had a way of making people disappear. It was said they were already off the grid - no phones, using the barter system, getting their credits in tokens under the table. Though, they usually went for memories. Memories were worth more than kids. </p><p>“Stop!” a voice yelped. </p><p>It sounded like Elli. </p><p>Zach grappled for a punch, aiming anywhere on the blurry mass that was the man’s face. He couldn’t tell if his vision was obscured by the drink, blood, his consciousness slipping away, or a combination. </p><p>The gun. </p><p>Zach scanned the pavement. His heart pumped the alcohol away, if only for a second, enough for him to focus, to have one last chance at keeping himself alive. Trembling, he flung himself down, grabbing the black stick with hands that were suddenly not his own, hands that had already felt the curve of a trigger, fingers that had already curled round it. The man jumped at him. </p><p>And then he shot.</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0006"><h2>6. Near Death</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>He didn’t know where the bullet hit, just that the man went down, crumpling in on himself at odd angles and in contortions that should have triggered pain receptors. He could see the man was still breathing – but for how long? He didn’t know what his face looked like, just that it was a jumbled mess of red and beige with liquids of the same colors oozing. He didn’t know where the gun was, just that his arm shook from the recoil and the motion of pulling the trigger still echoed in his index finger. </p>
<p>Zach clasped his soiled hands over his mouth. “S-shit.” </p>
<p>And for a moment, memorosurgery didn’t exist, his glove didn’t exist, Elli didn’t exist, that boy who somehow recognized him didn’t exist. He didn’t think of Sarah or her cat, or Miles or Kick, his old apartment in Portland, or his job - old or current. He didn’t think of his alcoholism, the AA flyers he used to pick up or the late night web searches about substance abuse. He didn’t think about the blood that rolled down his chin and splattered onto his shirt. He didn’t think about the throbbing in his eye or the ache in his jaw. He didn’t think about the hands that had been firmly gripped round his neck, choking the air out of his throat. </p>
<p>He perceived, but didn’t think, about the man in front of him. Still, like a tree, like those bodies he used to operate on, unconscious, with branching veins sprouting from their skulls. Still. <br/>He vomited. </p>
<p>Bounty hunters didn’t exist. They weren’t in the system. They didn’t upload their memories, no matter how horrific. </p>
<p>He retched again, this time only relieving himself of a clear liquid. His stomach ached as he clenched it. He needed a drink. No, his glove. His glove. </p>
<p>Tilting his head so that the body was out of his peripherals, he looked up at the kid still lingering by his truck. Why had he stayed? Because he tried to protect him? He cursed him for staying. He was a witness.</p>
<p>His actions were erratic. His thoughts too. He had convinced himself he was sober, but his mouth knew otherwise. His eyes too. He started crying, smearing blood and salt round his face. </p>
<p>The boy moved cautiously closer to him. “You saved me,” he said as if trying to console him. “He - he would have killed me. I know he would have.”</p>
<p>“You knew my name. How?”</p>
<p>“No, I -” He putted the ground like he was hiding something. </p>
<p>“Why do you remember me?” Especially when no one else did.</p>
<p>“Y-you saved me,” said the boy. </p>
<p>A roar of laughter broke out from the bar, awakening Zach to his senses. “Shit. Whatever. We have to leave.” </p>
<p>He knew he shouldn’t be driving, not a kid least of all. But he buckled him tightly into the passenger seat after pocketing his glove and the gun and drove back to his apartment.</p>
<p>He didn’t ask the boy anymore about the bounty hunter or the reason he knew his name. He just gave him some leftover lo mein and chicken nuggets and hot chocolate and let him sleep in his bed. </p>
<p>Zach rubbed his hands together nervously, looking at the kitchen cabinet beneath the sink while he listened to the boy’s heavy breathing. How could he sleep? Still woozy from all the whiskey, Zach thought about his bottle of scotch. One drink, he thought. But then he looked over at the bed. Shit.</p>
<p>His glove. </p>
<p>He suddenly became conscious of the weight in his side pocket, the fingertips of the folded glove a stark white against his blue jeans. First, the kid’s memory. Then mine. </p>
<p>He had to. How could he let this incident scar him? </p>
<p>He slipped his fingers in. A wave of relief swept over him, as if he had just poured that scotch down his throat. He knelt over the bed where the boy slept and held out his gloved hand over the boy’s skull. Find the memory. Abstract. Contain. Just like back at the clinic. He’d throw away the memory like he did the key, preventing him from ever finding out whatever had happened to him that night, the flashes of sounds and images forever remaining in a haze of which the complete experience would never again, could never again, be perceived.  </p>
<p>The tips of the glove lit up, the boy’s memories beginning to flash through his mind - the lo mein, the late night cartoons, the new age music in the passenger seat of the truck, an abstract dream - something with an expanse of blue and flowers and thick red trees, a man’s face that refused to come into focus though Zach could be sure wasn’t his. Just a little more, and he’d find it. </p>
<p>Sleep was the perfect time to perform a memorosurgery. The patient didn’t even know he was flipping through his memories. He could view anything he wanted, could wave his hand and go back five years, see how he knew Zach’s name and why that bounty hunter was after him. Just. Zach swayed his hand, entranced by the childlike perspective. A little. Kids usually didn’t get memorosurgery, unless they were being prepared for the temple, or they had some extremely traumatic experience. Actually, there were a lot more kids lately. More.</p>
<p>A whimper stopped him. The boy’s face scrunched up and then he rolled over, clutching himself into fetal position, as if in pain. </p>
<p>The glove dimmed. He hadn’t found the memory. He hadn’t seen the first encounter with the bounty hunter. He hadn’t seen the first time he and the boy had met. He couldn’t. There was darkness, a gray haze of images that occurred and recurred, all the same. Had the boy already been wiped? Was that why the bounty hunter was after him? He recoiled with his glove, peering over the boy’s sleeping form. And despite his inability to go back further, he couldn’t abstract the boy’s memories of Zach either. Reaching that dark, hazy expanse in the boy’s mind gave Zach the same feeling he had toward memorosurgey when he decided to become a trucker instead. He thought back to how he had stuck up for those memorosurgeons only a few hours before. Maybe the practice really was immoral.</p>
<p>With the boy huddled over on the opposite side of the bed, Zach laid down and tilted his head back, resting his gloved hand on the top of his own skull. He closed his eyes. No drink would have to banish this memory. He’d just abstract it then let himself drift off to sleep. </p>
<p>He saw the memory. And he winced, wanting to vomit again. Abstract, he thought. And then a wispy face trailed up in his mind, dominating the memory. Elli. </p>
<p>He looked over at the boy. </p>
<p>Sometimes memories are necessary, if only because they stimulate the drive to protect someone; protect the little girl sleeping upstairs; push her away from the bathroom door as the police entered; tell her to get herself a glass of milk, just not the glasses stained with amber, the liquid sticking to the bottom having not been washed, the glasses that should have been hidden; protect the little girl by becoming a memorosurgeon, because his only drive to go to school was that moment when he saw his brother lying on the floor, eyes transfixed, in a pool, stiff and curled in at odd angles; the image still haunting him, compelling him to learn the trade that half the world believed was a curse; protect the girl by keeping the memory, locked up inside himself, because he knew that his remembering was the only way she could remain, not in forgetting the memory, but in the absence of it. Protecting the memory, so it never tainted, never penetrated, hers. </p>
<p>He peeled off the glove, tucked it into his night table drawer and closed his eyes.</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0007"><h2>7. Influences</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>In the morning, Zach opened a cookbook for the first time since he made Mont Blanc for Sarah one Valentine’s Day; eggs, powdered sugar, salt, and chocolate had coated his kitchen. He was used to ordering out: bento boxes with inari rolls and fresh salmon, grilled chicken and sautéed green beans in Styrofoam, lettuce with fetta and chopped tomatoes and cucumbers. His friends in memorology school did the same, their professors telling them they didn’t have time to cook and that their salaries later in life would cover all their eating expenses. </p>
<p>Now even the flour and eggs and milk seemed difficult. In their old house, Zach remembered Elli standing on a stepstool one morning, pouring over the counter, before the man in the navy suit came but after Hollis was no longer with them. Hollis had sometimes made pancakes on Saturday mornings, breaking their routine of corn and wheat cereal. When Zach woke to find batter splattered over the cabinets, the floor, and Elli’s dress, he cursed and scolded her, sending her, crying to her room, all while she explained that she wanted to surprise him. He hated having to clean up after her, yet, now, he wished he could go back to that moment, and behave how Hollis would have - smiling and taking her hand to guide the silicon spoon round the red plastic bowl, folding the mess of batter, checking the edges of the cakes on the griddle, teaching her when they were ready to flip, to be careful not to let them burn, then, while letting them cool, he would have gotten two wet rags, and, handing one to Elli, would have simply motioned to the floor and then would have reached the places the girl couldn’t. Elli would have learned both to cook and to clean up after herself, lessons more valuable than deterring her from upsetting her older brother. </p>
<p>When the batter sizzled on the griddle, Russell rolled over in the bed, pulled the elephant up from where it rolled on the floor, and flipped on the tv. </p>
<p>“Hey, turn it to seven for a minute, will you? I need to see the news.”</p>
<p>The boy sighed but obeyed and played more with his elephant.</p>
<p>The newscaster motioned to a greenscreen overlaid with numbers and little symbols of clouds and suns, another talked about an upcoming protest outside the university for memorology, and yet another reported on the story he wanted to hear. Police were searching for the assailant of a man claiming he was a trucker that happened the previous night in the parking lot of a bar in Oakridge. His bruised, swollen face flashed on the screen as he gave his testimony, causing Zach to turn away. “Son of a bitch is still alive?” Zach said, though he was relieved he hadn’t killed anyone, even in defense. But he also knew the man wouldn’t quit his search for a bounty reward. Then he turned to Russell again who by now had wandered to the stove. “Sorry.”</p>
<p>Russell peered up at Zach’s spatula. “Can I have one?” he said, holding out his toy in front of him, as if forcing the elephant to look at the pancakes. And when Zach looked down at the boy, he saw a little girl waving her doll around, smiling, and waiting for her older brother to take notice of her. </p>
<p>“Y-yeah,” Zach said, taking a plate from his cabinet and choking back a hard lump in his throat. </p>
<p>When they first got into the apartment the night before, Zach had to scold him for talking so loudly, as he fumbled drunkenly for the right key, though his whispers were just as loud. He had to stop him from tugging down posters, from knocking over dead succulents Sarah had given to him alive, from bouncing on the bed and examining the medicine cabinet in the bathroom - the shaving cream and the herbal supplements designed for sleeping - from shattering the empty glasses round the room Zach always said he’d get around to washing. As Zach warned him not to touch this or that, his headache grew each time he had to pull him away, as he dug through bins in his bathroom cupboard for a spare toothbrush and paste.</p>
<p>“Let me try?” Russell bounced on his heels as Zach flipped the cake, trying not to associate the boy with the girl who was about his age when he last saw her. But the boy was a living memory, his boisterous mannerisms echoing his sister’s. He assured himself that the boy would only be his responsibility for a little while, until he could find his family or at least find out why bounty hunters were after him. </p>
<p>He wanted to say no, that he didn’t want him to make a mess, but the memory of Elli - cheeks and forehead covered in flour, vigorously stirring the batter to surprise a brother who always slept in late, who shooed her out of his room when he was on his laptop, who groaned every time she said she was hungry and there were no more leftovers in the fridge - was so prominent in his mind that he had to blink hard to see him as someone other than the girl. </p>
<p>He handed the boy the spatula, thinking maybe he could rewrite memories. “You saw how I did it?”</p>
<p>Russell nodded, rushing for a moment into the dining room to place his stuffed elephant on a chair. “Wait here, Pirandello.”    </p>
<p>“That his name? Where’d you hear that one?” Zach never paid much attention in his literature classes; he was always more focused on the student with short, curly brown hair who scrawled the faces of characters, always facing at least three different directions - up, down, and to one side or the other. But the name echoed somewhere in the reserves of his mind, as they were forced to take on the parts of a play and read their roles aloud, but Zach was more interested in seeing whether or not those drawing hands would stop when it was his turn to speak. </p>
<p>Russell shrugged as he grabbed the spatula from Zach, sliding it under the pancake, then pulling it away from the stove when he went to flip it. Before Zach could reach out and push his hand back, the cake was already on the floor. </p>
<p>“Whoops.” </p>
<p>Zach cursed as he knelt down for it, taking a deep breath in to prepare for the scolding drudged from anger. But when he looked back up at the boy, the girl’s face flashed over his, tears threatening at the threshold of those deep brown eyes. He breathed out slowly and, remembering his reactionary foul language, apologized as he scraped the half-cooked batter from the floor with a paper towel. <br/>“S-sorry,” Russell said, backing away, as if sensing an incipient explosion. </p>
<p>Zach held back a disgruntled sigh, trying to imagine how Hollis might behave in the same situation, focusing on replicating his gentle expressions. “’s okay. Gotta make sure you hold it over the griddle.”<br/>“I’ll get it next time.”</p>
<p>Zach wanted to say there wouldn’t be a next time, to tell him to just wait at the table with Pirandello, to not touch his ceramic saltshakers. He concentrated on enduring it for only a few more days, until he got some notice on the news about family members who were looking for a boy with dirty blonde hair and dark eyes, that after, he could just wipe every memory of the boy with his glove and then he wouldn’t be concerned with how he knew his name. </p>
<p>But instead, he gave the boy the spatula and carefully guided him by the elbow as he flipped the batter. </p>
<p>“There you go.”</p>
<p>“I did it!”</p>
<p>He tried to imagine Elli with the same reaction, if he had only helped rather than scolded, had only been a brother instead of treating her like a burden. He stifled the tears as he reached for two glasses and set a plate in front of Pirandello.</p>
<p>***</p>
<p>Zach grew accustomed to having an extra person around, falling back in line with the brief time in his past when he lived only with Elli, though this time with a deeper sense of responsibility, no doubt spurred on, he knew, from the melancholy memories of those days and the guilt injected into him from those flashes of sounds and images.  </p>
<p>“Russell, dinner’s ready!” </p>
<p>Russell rolled over on the ground before the tv, some cartoon with a whale and a fish with legs was on, the boy guided his stuffed elephant through the air, making whooshing sounds with his pursed lips. </p>
<p>Zach smiled and shook his head, spooning the eggs and peppers and cheese on two plates. It felt nice to have someone around again, to ask if it was too warm in the house, to have meals with at regular times, to flick off the boisterous cartoons when he had fallen asleep, to tuck the fleece blanket beneath his chin then go out on the porch for a cigarette. It somehow felt nice to be belabored with questions, asking about the girls in the pictures, about why the one frame with the woman and cat was set faced down, asking whether he too might try to smoke. Zach hadn’t had a drink in two days, and though it and the glove called to him, he busied himself with cleaning Russell’s mess or reading him a story off his phone from one of those parenting apps. </p>
<p>“Russ,” Zach called again through the breakfast bar then stepped into the adjacent dining room and set the steaming plates on the table. </p>
<p>Russell rolled on his back, still whirling his toy above him. “Can’t I eat here?”</p>
<p>The way the boy whined sounded sometimes so like Elli, the pleading droll of the words, the fascination with his toy ensnaring his attention. If only something so simple could captivate Zach, then maybe he wouldn’t think so much about the glove or about the memories that so often infiltrated his present. </p>
<p>“I,” Zach began, wincing even as he said it, “I need to talk to you.”</p>
<p>The boy sprung up, propping himself on his elbows, resting his chin on his knuckles, Pirandello now toppling over next to him. “Aw, but this is the best part!”</p>
<p>“You,” Zach sighed, “You weren’t even watching that!”</p>
<p>“Am now.”</p>
<p>“Get over here.”</p>
<p>The boy lifted himself, dragging his elephant with him to the table. Zach passed him a fork, and he began to eat, his stuffed toy still dancing in his other hand. He peered over the boy’s shoulder at the television where lanky robots rolled on the screen and was reminded of the morning news report. </p>
<p>“Russ, we can’t stay here.”</p>
<p>The boy shoveled some more eggs into his mouth but didn’t meet Zach’s gaze. “You’re gonna hand me over.”</p>
<p>“I’m not.” Zach picked up a fork and began poking around on his own plate. He never imagined himself as a father figure. Sure, he took care of Elli. But that was only for a few years before she went into foster care. And discipline was always Hollis’s job. Along with the cooking and the shopping and making their living. Zach wished he did more. He had tidied and did the laundry and taught Elli how to draw and piece together puzzles and make peanut butter and jelly sandwiches while Hollis worked two part-time jobs. But at that time, Zach was only a teenager, and he had no idea how to be a parent. Even back then, he used to get drunk with his friends, and Elli, who took the bus home from her elementary school, would be sitting at the kitchen table working on her alphabet while she watched Zach stumble through the door, thick with the smell of cigarette smoke and weed. He always assured her that he wasn’t acting any different, just that his mind was strained from school, and then they would sit together and watch tv. When Hollis got home, he’d always scold him, all while Elli peered over from the couch wondering what Zach had done, not understanding that his dank, musty smell was something he should have been ashamed of. He tried to get his act together, but he felt he had every right to go numb - to forget that their parents died in that car accident, leaving their twenty-year-old son, who hadn’t even gotten the chance to attend that ivy league he got accepted to, to raise the five-year-old since their seventeen year old son could barely take care of himself. If he couldn’t numb out that way, he’d study memorology. But that schooling came too late. </p>
<p>“We’re both wanted. It’s only a matter of time they track us.” He looked up from his plate. “Russell, are you listening to me?”</p>
<p>“Yeah,” the boy replied, dragging out his word as he dragged his fork along his plate. </p>
<p>Zach’s phone vibrated next to his plate. He saw a stream of digits he didn’t recognize and peered at it tentatively. The police? He only hoped it wasn’t worse than that.</p>
<p>“H-hello?”</p>
<p>“He-hey! Wasn’t sure you’d pick up. Man, it’s poppin’ ‘ere! Guy buying shots for everyone!”</p>
<p>“Miles? How’d you get my number?” He cocked his head over at Russell who scraped his fork over his plate. Despite the confusion, even Zach could not admit to being upset at the man on the other end. For the past two days, the only human voices he heard were from Russell and the tv. </p>
<p>“Man, you were so wasted!”</p>
<p>Yeah, Zach blacked out. Too bad it hadn’t happened after the bar. “Shit, man,” then he looked up at Russell and grit his teeth. Not a good influence. “You know what?” He had to ask, had to try. When they identified him, they would be able to track his truck’s license plate. He would never get far. “If I buy you a drink, can I borrow your truck?”</p>
<p>“Kowalski, I’ll buy you a drink! Hey, why you need my truck?”</p>
<p>“Come with me. Just need to get out of town.”</p>
<p>“With you? Sure, anything.”</p>
<p>“Well, there’s someone else too.”</p>
<p>“Oh? Your girl?”</p>
<p>Zach peered over at Russell and gave him a half smile. “Let’s just say someone who can’t drink.”</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0008"><h2>8. Second Appendage</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Zach pulled into the lot he had nights before, the scene of his crime, now equipped with a duffle bag packed tightly with overnight supplies for both him and Russell: some spare nonperishable food, two washcloths, a shaver, a roll of clean t-shirts, his journal, his glove, and his gun. Of the last three items, the foremost he had no question about taking, having written in it every night since he first had thoughts about entering school for memorology, filling it with experiences and words of advice, mapping out who he believed himself to be, and ripping out other parts of himself he longer wished to identify with – pages torn from their seams that mirrored the gap in his mind created by his glove. His glove, the second item that gave him a bit of anxiety, knowing it was in the bag resting beneath Russell’s dangling feet below the passenger seat. But it seemed to naturally coincide with his journal; he never knew what memories he might want to delete, and if he had to give up alcohol for the time being to avoid negative influence on the boy, at least he could take comfort in having his glove nearby. The gun he stole from the bounty hunter was more variable - his wild card But something about the memory he tore away, the one that made him quit his job and move to Oakridge, something about the frantic writing on the page after one of the jagged seams, compelled him to take it. It would be a waste to leave it in his apartment. </p>
<p>As he got out of his truck, he peered round, hoping the cops wouldn’t already be looking for him. </p>
<p>“Russell!” he called as the boy rushed off toward the front of the bar, and he locked the truck, not sure why he was doing it. He wouldn’t be coming back. Out of habit, he supposed.</p>
<p>“Oh, a puppy!” Russell said before Zach caught up with him, and the boy kneeled before the same bull terrier Zach fed the night before. “This your doggy?”</p>
<p>“Russell,” Zach called again, worrying he was bothering the two men in rocking chairs. </p>
<p>“Eh?” said the older man on the left, peering over his beer. He laughed beyond glazed eyes. “She’ll eat anything.”</p>
<p>Russell rubbed her side, and the dog rolled over. “What’s ‘er name?”</p>
<p>The man laughed again. “Where’s your father, kid?”</p>
<p>Russell looked back at Zach instinctively who came up behind him and placed a hand on the boy’s shoulder. “Sorry, we’re just here to meet someone.”</p>
<p>“Keep a better eye on ‘im. Kids’ll get into anything.”</p>
<p>Zach swallowed hard. He had always learned lessons too late, learned too late how to take care of others. He was too late to prevent his younger sister from drinking the full bottle of cough syrup, too late to seal his lips of words not for children, too late to sense the extent of his brother’s thoughts, too late to stumble home, too late to refuse that last drink and the hand rolled joint, too late to open the bathroom door, too late to ask if everything was ok. “Yes, sir.”</p>
<p>Zach guided the boy into the bar. </p>
<p>“My man!” a voice called, almost immediately, and Miles sauntered up to them, bottle in hand. “And who’s this gentleman?”</p>
<p>“I’m Russell!” </p>
<p>“Miles.” Miles pounded the boy’s fist with a smile then took a long sip before looking up at Zach again. </p>
<p>“What’s it taste like?” the boy asked, bouncing up on his heels to get a whiff of the drink.</p>
<p>“Oh, lemme get you one.”</p>
<p>“Miles.”</p>
<p>“This your brother, or?”</p>
<p>“He’s the reason I need your help.”</p>
<p>Miles cocked an eye at him, seeming to suddenly sober up. “My truck.” </p>
<p>Zach nodded. </p>
<p>Miles set his drink down on an empty table then led the two outside and handed Zach the keys. “You’d better drive.”</p>
<p>Zach didn’t know where he’d go. Just as long as he was away from memorosurgeon laboratories and temples endorsed by the feds and away from his local crime scene. Something told Zach to go back to Portland, to the ritzy apartments and the suburbs with patches of tulips and ivy vine covers. Sarah’s place. His grandmother’s. Maybe he could try to visit the foster home where Elli was taken. He wondered if she would still be there. </p>
<p>And then he thought they might seek refuge at a temple. The doctor he had been doing his residency under warned him of the “temples” supported by donations; he had called them “cults” all while slim fingers tipped with those white crescent moon fingernails covered in a thin fabric carved into an adolescent girl’s brain, as he attempted to syphon the memory of a violent attack, and told Zach not to look when he reached it as the images pulsed through the wires lining their white gloves. Dr. Seymour said the “cults” sold their memories to black market dealers for a profit, that they didn’t train their martyrs enough to contain the confessions, that they were a ticking time bomb waiting to take revenge on the system. But those “cults” wouldn’t be looking for Russell. And they certainly wouldn’t be concerned about Zach’s plight with a bounty hunter, so long as he didn’t disclose his use of the glove. And he heard that while government-run temples barred outsiders for fear they might influence their martyrs, the “cults” welcomed the public, performed the receiving sacrament right there, were known to feed the homeless and to cloth and house them. Seymour told him it was all a tactic to convert more martyrs, to have more memories to strip and sell, but Zach was desperate. </p>
<p>Russell climbed into the truck as Miles fumbled in the passenger seat for a cigarette. The boy plopped down in the center seat and excitedly peered over the control panel, brushing his hands over nobs and levers. </p>
<p>Zach turned the key in the ignition. “Miles, maybe not in here.” He looked over his shoulder with the truck in reverse. </p>
<p>The tattooed man kept his focus out the window, opening it and tapping the end of the cigarette between his fingers. </p>
<p>“Miles,” Zach said again, this time rousing the man from his daydream. </p>
<p>“Why?” came a smaller voice. “You do it.” </p>
<p>Zach peered over at Russell. “Yeah, but out on the porch.”</p>
<p>“I can still smell it.”</p>
<p>He sighed. “I’m sorry.”</p>
<p> </p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0009"><h2>9. Martyrdom</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>The next few hours were filled with chatter about night lights, places Miles had visited, other bars in the area they should visit when they had the chance, ice cream places that Russell might like that made the boy plead Zach to stop at one, about music, especially when Miles and Russell took turns flipping the station from country to techno, lyrics that Zach didn’t recognize, that Miles hummed along with and Russell drummed his hand. </p>
<p>They stopped at a gas station when they needed to refill and when Russell had thankfully forgotten about the ice cream. While Miles filled the tank, Zach bought some snacks for the rest of the drive, picked out some granola bars that claimed to be healthy and an apple juice for Russell’s breakfast. He used to give Elli whatever was left in the cupboard above the sink, even if that meant jellybeans or leftover Halloween candy. He handed it to her with a smile, as if he was the best brother in the world, when he was really just unwilling to go to the grocery store to check off the shopping list Hollis had left for him before leaving for his early shift. Elli always bounced on her heels when he handed her the cereal bowl full of pink and purple gummies and chocolate bars. He cringed at the thought and put a few bananas in his hand cart.</p>
<p>As he handed the cashier a few tokens he had saved under his mattress in case of emergency, he saw the newspaper next to the display of lighters, pointed to it then gave the man another token. The headline was about the assault in the parking lot, but a smaller title signaled a list of missing children inside. As the cashier bagged his items, he flipped to the last page and scanned the little faces. And four columns down, the photo no bigger than the tip of his thumb, was that straggly, dirty blonde hair. The pout in his lips reminded him of the way Miles looked when he pursed his lips in thought, furrowed his brow behind thick bangs that hung over his eyes. Funny how quickly people rub off on one another. The caption beneath said that if found, to call Eckhart Temple before listing a bolded string of ten numbers. </p>
<p>During his residency, he worked closely with intermediaries who uploaded memories to the machine that pumped them to the martyrs. He had taken ethics classes on the politics of all of it in college, when he started paying attention in school and taking notes on the PowerPoints and the lectures rather than scrawling out journal entries or poems or notes to friends. The only way memorosurgery was deemed legal was for the state to employ those martyrs, so that the memories wouldn’t be thrown away. Changing an identity was deemed moral only if that identity still existed, even if not fully intact. An intermediary in a long silken robe spoke in one of those ethics classes, waving around their delicate hands as they warned against sanctuaries not sponsored by the state, saying that documentation was key to the system, documenting the martyrs that entered and the memories that changed hands, making sure every memory that was donated was given to the martyr designated to receive that memory; the system allowed each martyr to focus on dealing with a specific set of issues: loss of parents, infidelity in marriage, abuse, street violence. They categorized by age, gender, crime, perspective. Somehow, they asserted that it made the system more moral. Whenever the doctor abstracted a memory from his patient, he’d capture it in an orb and hand it to one of the technicians who would upload it to the system. The intermediary would meet with the doctor once every two or three weeks, sit with their bowed head in his office, while Zach sat off to the side and observed with open notebook and pen as the doctor dictated the memories he had deleted, and the intermediary would nod, mentioning names that had no meaning to either surgeon, names that would be the recipients of those memories. </p>
<p>Russell was wanted because he was marked for martyrdom - the way the government prevented taxpayer credits from being wasted on homeless orphans, the way these children could give back to society when circumstances had marked them as rejects, as having tendencies for committing crimes. They had no families, no homes, no ties to the outside world, not yet fully a person. And as such, they were the perfect recipients of other people’s memories, their young minds still malleable and able to be trained to accept traumatic experiences and live with them without fear or revulsion, to breathe through those memories without them having an effect on their actions or voluntary thoughts, to sit with them without them influencing their interactions with others, to suppress extreme emotions like excitement or anger, disappointment or disgust. To eat porridge for every meal, to sleep on a thin mattress supported by scrapped wooden planks, to accept that they had no identity other than the patchwork of memories fed into their minds every morning by the lattice of wires laced above a placid pool of water. </p>
<p>Miles piddled around by the pump, smoking a cigarette in front of a sign that forbid it. Inside the truck, Russell nestled in his seat, huddled against the side door. Zach lifted him and gently set him on the bed in the cabin and was grateful that Miles offered to drive the rest of the way. </p>
<p>His fingers tapped the windowsill as noiselessly as he could, itching for a smoke, or maybe the fidgeting was more a longing for the fabric glove that was tucked neatly inside his duffle bag.<br/>
Miles passed him a cigarette box after they drove a few more miles, and when Zach refused, he set the box on his seat without taking one for himself. “So, what’s the plan, doc?”</p>
<p>“Plan” - a word his brother hadn’t used after policemen knocked on their front door; instead he referenced the present moment, not the future, not “what’s next”: “what now?” With Hollis, it was always about protecting Elli, who then lay napping in her bedroom, huddled beneath her pink and purple comforter, sleep yet untainted with a sense of absence, a sense of missing. She slept still thinking, knowing, her parents would be back. The two words fell on deaf ears, Hollis must have known that; Zach could only think about his cupboard, getting another hit from his friends, or a memory - his new fix - but they were so expensive, more than a year’s worth of alcohol, a month’s worth of what he could smoke. Perhaps Hollis’s question was directed at himself, as he fumbled with his empty tea cup, the last sips having been taken before the men in uniform came, as he penciled thoughts and notes and highlighted words from his graduate level psychology textbook, no doubt his college graduation picture atop the table behind the sofa spurred him on, studded with honors cords, holding up his valedictorian speech. Once Hollis closed that book, it would be for the last time. And it was the first time Zach saw his brother cry, the first time Hollis let him see him cry. His older brother was only ever trying to get through the moment. Once their parents died, he had no future. </p>
<p>Zach instinctively looked back at Russell and sighed, shaking his head, hoping the motion would shake the memory. “Thanks for letting me use your truck. And coming along. Honestly, I think I’d be too afraid to take care of him alone.” </p>
<p>“Alone.” The word undulated in his mind, merging with the image of Hollis over that empty mug. Zach was always trying to numb out. That word must have been something Hollis felt often.<br/>
“Aw, you’re too hard on yourself. Bet you’ve had to take care of kids that came in for surgery.”</p>
<p>Zach chuckled nervously, thankful Miles’s words were something he could cling to while the current of his memory threatened to pull him under. “You know they’re out of it for that, right?”<br/>
“Yeah, or maybe siblings?” His tone suddenly became somber. </p>
<p>No matter how much the last word tugged at every muscle in his body, unsteadying him, choking his breath, thrusting him back under a sea of sounds, laughter, crying; dousing him with images of a young man lifting the young girl in a purple lace dress to the branch where a robin laid eggs, the white bathroom; the girl, doll in hand, rubbing her eyes, barred from entering; no matter the damage that word did to him, it always hurt more with the “s” at the end. </p>
<p>“I have a younger sister, yeah.”</p>
<p>“There ya go,” Miles said, turning for a moment from the road to tap him on the shoulder. “You’d have been fine.”</p>
<p>“Well,” Zach ventured, “let’s just say I wasn’t always the best role model.” He tried to swallow his guilt and, in his attempt, asked, “What about you?”</p>
<p>Miles brushed his nose. “A brother, yeah. I can relate, you know? M-maybe, maybe this is our second chance.”</p>
<p>Zach looked over his shoulder at Russell to make sure he was still asleep. “We’ve just gotta find someone who will take good care of him. I mean I do. You’ve already helped me so much; I can’t get you involved in anymore. He’s,” Zach didn’t know how to say it, especially having worked as a memorosurgeon, “he’s marked as a martyr.” </p>
<p>“No shit,” Miles breathed, slamming his hands on the wheel. “That how you picked him up?”</p>
<p>“No, I saw it in a paper back at the station,” he said, fidgeting his hand on the sill again. “I first saw him stealing out of my truck, night I met you. Bounty hunter was after him. Now I know why.”</p>
<p>“Shit, bet you messed him up pretty good.”</p>
<p>Zach clicked his tongue. “Yeah. What was I supposed to do? Threatening a kid.”</p>
<p>“Nah, you did the right thing, heh. But now they’re on you for assault.”</p>
<p>Zach nodded, trying to avoid the thoughts of the man lying on the pavement. Instead he grounded himself in thoughts of cigarettes, having a drink, his glove. </p>
<p>“Too bad you didn’t use your glove on him, heh.”</p>
<p>His consciousness again lingered with his glove, mimicking motions of slipping it on, the wires curling round, pressing into the fingers. “Done with that line of work. Bad feeling about it.” </p>
<p>“I commend that, really. Cute too that you stood up for those other memorosurgeons even though you told yourself to quit the job.”</p>
<p>Zach blinked at the first word of Mile’s second sentence, but he shrugged it off, feeling it unnecessary to store in his memory. He needed to remember to get his journal out of his duffle bag and write everything down as soon as they stopped to rest for the night, to write words manipulated to fit a past he wanted to remember - much like his brain - both canvases for his discretion. </p>
<p>Miles cast a smile in his direction. “We could just keep driving. I’ve got enough food in the back for a while. Processed stuff doesn’t go bad. Just get off the grid.”</p>
<p>Zach laughed.</p>
<p>“No, no, hear me out, man. There’s this place, truckers call it Valhalla, trees so big that it blocks out all service, heh. You, me, and Russ. No martyrs, no surgeons, no government. Just livin’ off the land, heh.”</p>
<p>“You’re crazy,” Zach said, laughing. “You know how to hunt?”</p>
<p>“Well, no, but we can learn. Here’s what we could do,” his voice got lower, “You used to be a memorosurgeon, right? Bet you’re still in the system. You could get us all into the arc-Hive, we could download all the memories we need to survive before we go. Even Russell would be our own little Lara Croft.”   </p>
<p>Zach chuckled some more, thinking maybe the man was joking. “The arc-Hive?”</p>
<p>“C’mon. You can’t tell me the system doesn’t copy the memories before they get to the martyrs. No way the feds would let all that information seep through their fingers.”</p>
<p>The arc-Hive. There was an empty seat in his systems neuroscience class that reminded his entire cohort never to talk about it. They knew it existed though were sworn to secrecy about the giant machine that housed all abstracted memories, kept on the thirty-first floor of the building in the center of the university for memorology. </p>
<p>Zach gazed back again at the boy who knew his name, and for a moment, he thought about consenting to the tattooed man’s plan. </p>
<p>Then he forced himself to think of his glove and the nights he could spend beyond all thought if people would just leave him alone – the nights when he could use whatever means necessary to suppress those droves of memories that blunted and blinded him. He needed a plan, something Hollis never had. He just needed a job for cash and a bed to sleep in. Couldn’t other people just have simple needs?  </p>
<p>He forced another laugh. “It’s just a myth.”</p>
<p>Miles grew quiet, and he lit up a cigarette as he drove the rest of the way to Portland.</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0010"><h2>10. Dreams</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Zach blinked from the passenger seat, peering over at a grey house surrounded by a white picket fence. Somehow, he knew it was the foster home where he sent Elli even though he never visited her like he promised, and yet, it looked so much like the house he grew up in. The door swung open, and he saw her being carried away in the grasp of a man wearing a navy suit – arms and feet flailing, crying, hands scraping tears away along with hair that was long at first, then short, then long again. Then she was in Hollis’s arms, and other hands tried to tear her away from him, then those same hands tried to tear her away from Zach. She looked back from the car ahead of Zach, first peering over at him with Hollis in the driver’s seat - a child swept into the hands of a family member into the car in front of him. The driver of his own car in a navy suit buttressed against the other’s bumper; the man in a white coat held a weapon that should have been a glove. There was a feeling - a knowing - that wresting a child from her, no, his family wasn’t right; a need to take a weapon, that weapon, and a need to use his ungloved fists to get it. A shot. And a scream. Tears streamed down his cheeks. They had to be together - family members. He couldn’t let it happen to him again, happen to someone else. Flashes of images and sounds he shouldn’t have remembered flickered though him – images and sounds he believed were a dream rather than a distant reality. </p><p>When Zach woke in the passenger seat, he blinked out the window, the remnants of his dream still weighing him down. There was a little girl kicking a stone beneath a billboard advertising fabric softener. She was far enough away that he shouldn’t have been able to hear her laughter, but he did. It tickled him, and at the same time dug somewhere deep inside him, puncturing a wound that he had sutured tightly. She reached up to a taller figure, and they exchanged something between their hands. The taller silhouette reached down, grabbed the object and patted the girl on her head. Zach tried to move, the pressure of his dream still disabling him. As he fumbled for the door handle, he blinked harder, this time expelling tears dredged from deposits deep in his chest. </p><p>In the early moments of morning, upon first waking, when consciousness is not yet fully roused and the senses still hear and feel things from distant realms, the dreamworld seems more real than the surroundings captured by the eyes. And even memories lay dormant. So when he saw Hollis, he wanted to run to him, wanted to ask him for forgiveness, wanted to tell Elli he’d never leave her again, never leave either of them again, would give up all his destructive habits if it meant they could just be together. His eyes, with their tears, were the only part of him that knew the truth. </p><p>When he stumbled out of the truck and caught his footing, the rush of memories came back to him, pulling him out of the dreamworld. </p><p>Miles waved over at him. “Morning, bedhead!”</p><p>Instinctively, Zach reached up to smooth his hair. “Russell, you’d better eat something. And you shouldn’t be in the sun too long.” </p><p>“Miles gave me an oatmeal cookie!” </p><p>Miles must have noticed the distaste on Zach’s face because, as he breathed in through his cigarette, he said, “Chill. It’s like oats and raisins.”</p><p>“I bought bananas at the mini mart last night.” </p><p>“I told you, I don’t like bananas,” Russell pouted.</p><p>“No, you just told me you didn’t want them in your pancakes.”</p><p>“Oh, Zach! C’mere! We saw a garden snake before. I think he went over here, but - oof. Maybe we could find him again.” Russell sputtered some leaves out of his mouth as he pushed a branch from a bush out of his face. </p><p>“You mean garter? Hey, try not to get your shirt all dirty,” Zach laughed, squatting down next to him.</p><p>“He was just here.” </p><p>“Hey, look,” said Zach, pointing, “there’s a little hole in the ground. That might be his home.”</p><p>“Really? His home? Could we give him some banana?”</p><p>“Don’t think they’d eat that, kiddo,” Miles said, finally finishing off his cigarette and stamping it out in the dirt. </p><p>Remembering the object passing between the child’s hands and the grasp of the taller silhouette, Zach frowned. “You didn’t let him try that, did you?”</p><p>“What, this? Naw.”</p><p>Russell quickly flashed a look at Miles who betrayed a glance back in his direction. </p><p>“You did, didn’t you?” Zach scolded. </p><p>“Aw, don’t get mad at him,” Russell pleaded. “I asked if I could.” </p><p>“Miles, he’s a kid!”</p><p>“You do it too,” Russell huffed, scooting closer to Zach. </p><p>“Yeah.” The thought of giving it up for good was too much for him to handle. Even when he saw those commercials about quitting when lounging on his couch after a day of deliveries, he would change the channel, justifying it by thinking that at least he wasn’t using his glove. He knew he should stop, if only because a kid was watching him almost every second of the day. But that didn’t stop him with Elli, didn’t stop him when Hollis, who must have felt similar to how Zach felt about Miles giving the boy a cigarette, clicked his tongue at him for his behavior around her. Though Miles seemed more responsible somehow than Zach when he was younger. Miles took an interest in Russell. It was only when looking through the telescope, eyepiece in the future, aperture in the past, that Zach finally took an interest in his sister. </p><p>“My back hurts,” Russell said, stretching. </p><p>Miles rubbed the back of his neck and rolled his head. “You’re telling me. What’s the plan for tonight, boss?”</p><p>Zach wanted to just sign up with another trucking company that didn’t care if he used a fake name, ask for his pay under the table in tokens, lease a new apartment with his first paycheck from some place that didn’t do background checks, lay low for a while, until the authorities forgot all about the assault in that bar parking lot; though by now, he was convinced they must have identified a name and a face. </p><p>He had planned that until then, they’d just camp out in the truck. But he had to find Russell a place to live, somewhere with no bad influences. Maybe that would assuage some of his guilt for the past. </p><p>He needed a place he could trust would feed Russell, give him a nice bed, raise him right. As long as he was far away from the government-run temples, the temples sustained by donations were known to welcome all people, from all walks of life, would give them a meal if they needed it. He’d stay close to Russell, judge the intentions of the monastics, then decide the best option for the boy.<br/>
“Well,” Zach said hesitantly, “when I was younger, my mom and I used to pass out food to the homeless at a church.”</p><p>“Heh, oh no. I learned to stay far ‘way from those. They use that as bait.”</p><p>“I know. They’re not all the same though. We could find a temple, get a meal, see where to go from there.” </p><p>“Temple? You crazy?” Miles motioned soundlessly at Russell who was still piddling around in the dust unaware.</p><p>“Oh, come on, you never had kids from temples come up to ask you for tokens? They’re not wiped.” </p><p>“They grow up becoming martyrs!” </p><p>“Only if they don’t get adopted. Guy I knew at school grew up in a temple before he was adopted.”</p><p>Miles just shook his head. “Heh, thought I was the irresponsible one.” </p><p>Zach knew it sounded stupid. But unlike the government temples, the ones sustained by donations never wiped their martyrs completely so, even when receiving memories, the martyrs kept a thread of their old identities. And bounty hunters would never think to look in the temples. It was the safest place for Russell. If he got adopted, he couldn’t be taken to Eckhart. Zach needed to get back to his own life. “It’ll just be for one night.” </p><p> </p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0011"><h2>11. Hollis</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>After asking a few passerbyers on the street, they were finally directed toward a small temple in the unkempt area of Portland where some of the shops’ doors were boarded up despite broken windows and where mangy orange cats pandered around for scraps. Miles identified a man he said he knew was selling memories and teased Zach about getting one. A boy approached them with an upturned baseball cap, asking for tokens, but when they told him they were looking for the temple, he offered to show them and took them to a building pressed tightly between two other shops, with a roof that slanted deeply on both sides and that might have once been red. Two lanterns hung over the doorway to signal potential congregants and on the stairs and stoop were several pots of neatly kept flowers and ferns. The inside resembled those plants more than the dilapidated roof, with its colorful stained glass windows, freshly painted beams running along the ceiling, and several benches in tidy rows facing the front of the sanctuary where a pool reflected a lattice of blinking wires before a stout wooden table and red cushions. </p>
<p>Zach explained to the monastic who greeted them that they were recently rendered homeless and were seeking room and board for the night. They gently agreed, and, without explaining the politics of their temple, showed them to the dining area where meals were served to the homeless at interval hours and then to a single room with two twin size beds that could serve as refuge for as long as they needed. </p>
<p>As soon as he set his duffle bag on the floor next to the bed on the right, Zach reached in and took out his lighter and box of cigarettes, carefully hiding them against his side, and let Miles and Russell know he’d be back in five minutes. He reminded Russell that the monastic had mentioned art supplies in the cabinet in the library down the hall. </p>
<p>Zach couldn’t help but chuckle after he left the two of them, each sprawled out on a bed, reveling in the plush sheets and mattresses, commenting that it was so much better than the foam car seat or cabin bed. </p>
<p>In the back of the church there was a little yard with two bigleaf maple trees, a fenced in garden with cucumbers, tomatoes, and blueberries, and a picnic table. Outside the temple, he could not have guessed a place like this existed in this part of town. He walked as far as he could away from the back entrance of the temple, sat down in the grass and lit one of his cigarettes, hoping the smoke wouldn’t drift inside.</p>
<p>He breathed in through his fingers, the solitude allowing his consciousness to sink back into the reserves of his mind. </p>
<p>“I can’t keep doing this, you know,” Hollis said, taking a seat on the stairs next to Zach and sighing, leaning back into the step, throwing his head back and looking up at the stars. “Give me one of those, will ya?” He reached over as Zach passed him a cigarette who then fumbled to start the lighter. Hollis had to take it from him, covering the stick in his mouth with his curved hand. “I get it, you know? I do. I had my high school friends. But after m-” he trailed off, taking a breath through his cigarette. After blowing out slowly, he started again, “After the accident,” he looked over at Zach, his brown eyes shimmering against the night sky and from a thin liquid that filmed over them. “You know I don’t like telling you this, but you have to grow up. Take some responsibility.” </p>
<p>Zach took a few puffs through his own cigarette and rolled his head back, still feeling loose from the antics with his friends during the evening, the dim lights in the five-hundred-square-foot apartment his friend rented under the table from his landlord, the cheap wine sloshing as the bottle passed from one person to another, the truth game with prodding questions that provoked Zach to drink too quickly. Why had those games always involved discussing the past? Always forcing him to escape the past by escaping the present. “I’m too young for this shit,” Zach said after a while. “You got to have your fun when you were my age.”</p>
<p>“She’s young. Everything you do makes an impact. You can lie to her now, but when she’s older, she’ll know what you’re doing. She looks up to us.” He took another breath through his cigarette and looked back up at the sky. “You’ve got to be strong. Not for me, not for you. For her.”</p>
<p>He breathed through his cigarette a few more times, Hollis’s ghost seeming to linger beside him. </p>
<p>After a while, he heard the sliding door open and close, and after the sound of summer grass bending beneath several tromping footsteps, Russell sat down next to Zach, stretching out his left leg and wrapping his arm round his right to model Zach’s position. </p>
<p>Reaching his arm out to snuff his cigarette, Russell caught Zach’s hand. “Can I try?”</p>
<p>Zach laughed, taking another breath through the snout. “No.” </p>
<p>Drawing both legs up and curling them under his chin, Russell pouted. “Miles ‘ould let me.” </p>
<p>“‘cause he doesn’t think how it might affect you.” </p>
<p>Russell piddled on the ground for a twig, broke it to the size of one of his fingers then thread it through his index and middle after carefully examining Zach’s gestures. After placing it in his mouth, he spat bits of dirt and bark. </p>
<p>“You think that’s bad, you don’t want to try one of these.” Zach said, smearing his in the dirt. “Russ, I need you to remember for me.”</p>
<p>“I told you, I don’t know why he was after me.”</p>
<p>“That’s not what I’m talking about. Do you have any family? Siblings?”</p>
<p>Russell sat back, took a deep breath, and curled in on himself. “I don’t remember,” he pouted. </p>
<p>“What were you doing before you got into my truck?”</p>
<p>“I don’t know.” He sounded angry. </p>
<p>Zach decided that asking was a wasted effort, knowing that even his glove could penetrate no further than the night he met the boy and a few blurred dreams. Maybe the surgeons already wiped him in preparation, even before taking him to the temple. He would note that in his journal later. But where had he been before being marked for martyrdom? In a foster home? An orphanage? Surely he had an uncle somewhere, or a grandparent. </p>
<p>Zach couldn’t help but think of Elli. Their father had been an only child and their mother’s sister was living overseas; his grandmother was unfit to look after anyone, didn’t even remember who Zach was. He tried to assure himself that he made the right decision with Elli. And now he was trying to do the same with his plans for Russell. He had to justify those plans with the fact that he knew he couldn’t be a father figure, couldn’t be a role model for anyone let alone some kid. The object he recently snuffed out was proof of that, his trembling fingers - always fumbling for a drink or his wired glove - were proof. But maybe it was a vicious cycle - justifying his destructive behaviors so that he could justify not looking after Elli or Russell. </p>
<p>He peered over at the boy, remembering those late nights he used to peer over at his little sister with resentment when her eyes were glued on the television, while he cursed the rest of his family for dumping this responsibility in his lap. If there was any reason to detach himself from the boy, it was because of this - because his very image collided with hers, constantly bringing to the surface those memories he so badly wanted to repress, wanted to delete with his glove, his only reason for refusal because he felt those memories of her and of Hollis made him strive to be a better person, and because, when he reached his fully idealized self, he’d go find Elli. If there was any fragment of Elli left. If she hadn’t been taken to a temple, hadn’t been marked for martyrdom like Russell. </p>
<p>As he looked at Russell, the boy’s image overlapping with the little girl in his memory, the resentment was gone. All that was left was guilt, regret, concern, and hatred for the boy he had been, the boy he knew, in many ways, he still was. He didn’t want to deal with that boy. </p>
<p>He stood up. “Think I’m gonna lie down for a bit.”</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0012"><h2>12. Escape</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Sleep. Another method of escape he used to flee his reality, though he usually had to induce it somehow, to prevent flashes of images and phrases of things he had done and said that jolted him awake, causing him to close his door, open the window, and light one of the papers he or one of his friends had rolled tightly. </p>
<p>He lay on the twin bed in their room at the temple, trying to imagine himself back at his studio apartment, while Miles and Russell sat out on the picnic table scribbling on and cutting up construction paper. </p>
<p>He stayed in bed and only emerged at dinner and tried to ignore Russell who insisted on sitting next to him and who bothered him with all the pictures he drew and with all the stories Miles and he told to go along with them. The boy pleaded with him to join them after they ate. Zach couldn’t stomach that much, not because the porridge was cold and the rice was overcooked, but because the boy’s antics reminded him so much of Elli that he did all he could to stop himself from embracing the boy and weeping bitterly. He staved off those tears by constantly reminding himself that he was not Elli. He was not his sister. He was not his past reembodied. </p>
<p>He curled up on the bed again and stayed awake long after Russell huddled beside him, tugging the covers away from him; long after Miles stumbled through their door, digging around for his belongings, cursing as he stubbed his toe against the bedframe; long after he returned and plopped down on the other bed; long after their heavy breathing signaled that they were asleep.  </p>
<p>Zach slipped out of bed, careful not to move too quickly and avoiding any areas that creaked. </p>
<p>He reached for Miles’s wallet atop the night table and slipped out one of the cards etched with Miles’s name in silver, eyed the man in the bed across from his, the white sheet pulled over and around his shoulders, ripped from the edge, his feet peeking out underneath its upturned corner. It felt wrong somehow, taking from someone who, in that moment at least, was so innocent, unaware, unlike the time his friends egged him on in a small mom and pop shop they visited during a camping weekend camping, all wanting a crunchy caramel treat but none willing to spend a token of their college stipends on empty calories. They’d already purchased overpriced water bottles and cans of chili the night before - as if that was somehow payment for their crime. Zach had pocketed the chocolate bar while peering over the shelf at the man at the counter whose gaze fixed on two of his other friends, creating a distraction by trying on pairs of sunglasses. He thought back to the page ripped from his journal, the bloodied man he left in the parking lot, the bruised and scarred fists that kept haunting him despite his attempt to wipe the memory. Maybe he was predisposed to crime. </p>
<p>He hid the card in his duffle bag along with his glove and revolver, weapons neither of which seemed more lethal than the other. He could use the glove on both of them, cause them to forget ever having met him; Miles would wake and assume he paid some of the martyrs to take a chunk of his memories, go back to being a trucker with a missing credit card, a chunk gone from his bank account, head back to Oakridge where he’d drink and smoke every night after his deliveries, Kick asking him questions about his friend Zach, and like Sarah, he would say he never knew him. </p>
<p>He could wipe Russell clean, releasing him of haunting thoughts of plastered missing advertisements and token rewards, his delicate psyche cleared of Zach’s smoking influence, his drunken fights, Miles’s scent of substances breathed or eaten. The temple might adopt him. It was better than Eckhart. This “cult” seemed more humane; some of the kids still had their own memories, untainted by the intrusion of others’, ruled needing another year before they could act as recipients, still having to pull their weight by helping with the dishes or sweeping the floors or taking out the trash. But it was no different than the chores in a family. He might be given a chance at a life better than he gave Elli. </p>
<p>He wasn’t ready to be a father then, and he wasn’t ready to be a father now. He was an alcoholic, justifying his consumption by keeping his glove in sight, downing his liquid as he applauded himself for not having to resort to using it, too afraid that if he got help he might turn to another method to escape his memories. Justifying it with the fact that he never hurt anyone while he drank, and if he wasn’t hurting anyone, no one could tell him it was wrong. He never usually got angry, unless someone posed a threat to himself or another, and even then, he justified his actions - his injuring that trucker and that bounty hunter - by saying that he was standing up for another, protecting Russell, speaking out against the discrimination of memorosurgeons. He was a thief too, but he justified his stealing by assuring himself that it was a precursor to survival, that it was necessary to avoid being tracked, at least until he got to a place where he could settle, get a job and an apartment, wipe his memories so he could start over, so that if police questioned him, he could be honest in pleading not knowing anything, in pleading innocence. Not knowing, not remembering a crime, was innocence. <br/>There were chunks missing from his life, pages ripped from his journal, torn at the seam, a splotch of ink, a line, a rogue letter, an “a,” a capital “L,” illegible writing in his own hand, scrawled hastily, angrily, then left there, because a Zach he would never know, never recover, never understand, never be, had deemed those lone letters safe to keep because alone, they were void of meaning. He thought back to that locked drawer in his old apartment, the nauseating feeling it gave him, the next page imploring him to quit his job, to move to Oakridge, to just get the first job that presents itself, to flee everything attached to the institutionalized system of memorosurgery, to trust his external memory - his compiled, refined, revised, external self. The only constant, the only way to identify himself was his penmanship. His handwriting was his identity. He could say that the person he was, the person he remembered, was decent. Alcoholic, yes, but protective, following a sense of morality, a willingness to survive, not like other criminals who caused destruction for sport, who stole for the thrill, killed for revenge or glory, who started fires just to see if they could burn the evidence. </p>
<p>But those ripped pages - in recycling bins, in landfills, in ashes washed down drains, drowned in pools of water to blur the ink - they might contain a very different Zach - a Zach he was too afraid to keep. He couldn’t even know he deleted a memory, unless he saw and felt the ripped seam in his journal that signaled something had also been torn from his mind. He wasn’t ready to be a father. He couldn’t protect Russell. The boy was safer in the sanctuary, even if that meant giving up his independence. Zach couldn’t be sure he wasn’t dangerous to others. That was how he justified leaving the boy who knew his name. </p>
<p>He felt beneath his rolled t-shirt where he remembered stashing his journal before leaving the apartment in Oakridge. He would make an entry explaining that leaving was the right thing, that Russell was in better hands - hands that knew how to handle children, hands that didn’t steal, hands that didn’t hold lit cigarettes and drinks in tumblers, hands that didn’t clench into fists and fight back until someone was rendered unconscious. The boy was safer out of his hands. </p>
<p>He fumbled past his toothbrush, his razer, his shaving gel, thrusting aside his melatonin bottle. His journal was gone. He scanned the room, trying to remember if he had placed it on one of the dressers or underneath the night table.    </p>
<p>Russell rolled and whimpered from the opposite edge of his bed, and Zach stilled, his hands hovering over his gun to conceal it. </p>
<p>The boy opened and rubbed his eyes. “Zach?” he whispered. His droopy eyes scanned the duffle bag that engulfed both of Zach’s hands. “Where are you going?”</p>
<p>“Shh… Just to the bathroom.” Waiting to see if the boy would fall back asleep, Zach held his hands in the mouth of his bag. To his dismay, the boy rolled down the bedsheet further and sat up, his eyes growing wider, pupils grasping for stray light in the darkness. Zach thought of the glove. He still had time to use it; he could slip it on and kneel beside the bed with his fingers clasped round the young boy’s temple, sift through memories and eliminate any that had to do with him; he could escape without another question. And Russell would no longer even know his name. </p>
<p>“What you need from the bag?”</p>
<p>“My shaver.” Somehow, he felt more guilty lying than leaving. </p>
<p>“Oh.”</p>
<p>“Go back to sleep.”</p>
<p>“I had a dream. I was close to the shore, but the water, the water kept pulling me. And then the sand did too. The waves wanted to swallow me, but the sand wanted to tear me apart. I-I didn’t know which side to go with, th-they both wanted me dead.”</p>
<p>“Shh, shh… It’s ok,” Zach said, his hands yet unmoving. “Think of something you like, think of that show we used to watch. Super Guardians?”</p>
<p>“Super Guard Squad.”</p>
<p>“Yeah,” Zach looked down, hoping that the loss in eye contact would yield in the boy surrendering to his feather pillow. </p>
<p>“I think I like the story Miles told me about the three-headed man better.” The boy blinked a few times, then curled in over his knees, gripping his feet. “Hurry back, please? I-I’m scared.”</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0013"><h2>13. Chapter 13</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>The last two stuttered words, the filtered dawn light through the thick fabric curtains, the soft sniffling, all made Zach suddenly unable to distinguish the boy seated in front of him. A moment ago, he was a boy curled up in a minimalist bed, but his messy brown hair grew, curling round the cheeks and over the shoulders, and brown eyes shimmered against the twilight haze cast through kitchen windows. The child’s form sat upright, hunched over folded arms on a wooden table in front of a manilla folder and a stack of papers with small text and blank lines at the bottom. </p>
<p>The man with a navy suit sat across from Zach, next to Elli, and placed a gentle hand on the girl’s forearm as he reassured Zach that this was the best option for both of them, that without parents and the only other family in the area a grandmother with dementia, she would receive the best care he could hope for, that she would be raised with other children her age, would be sent to school, would be able to ask her older siblings for help with her homework, would be placed with loving parents who would feed her three healthy meals a day, buy her new clothes and sneakers, a new doll, would be eligible for receiving donations, even in the form of scholarships for when she was planning for college. </p>
<p>The man pointed at the bottom line with his black ballpoint pen, commenting that single parents who started school for memorosurgery never finished. Even then, Zach thought of the glove that, at that time, he had not even tried on; his virgin fingers already lusted for its power. The thought that he could delete, if he got through his schooling, consoled him. </p>
<p>He signed. </p>
<p>The navy suit nodded toward Elli, patting her arm. “You’re going to a pretty new home. And you’ll have new siblings too.”</p>
<p>Her deep brown eyes peered into Zach’s, and her tiny hands trembled. He knew Elli didn’t understand what was happening. He knew she didn’t understand how much work she was for Zach, how she was inhibiting him from enrolling in school, from having friends, from going to parties, from staying out past midnight, from meeting girls. He knew she didn’t know who this man was, why he showed up on their doorstep with a briefcase two days after Zach made a phone call. He knew she didn’t know why he came bearing a little stuffed teddy bear, like the ones made by the thousands in factory lines, the ones with fur that had been sewn on backward and that had a patch with the company’s name branded on its foot. He wasn’t even sure she understood what happened to Hollis that night the police came and he told her not to get water from the bathroom tap, to use the kitchen sink or get a glass of milk from the fridge instead. He knew she didn’t understand these things. But her eyes and hands knew, and they spoke through her mouth, “Zach, I’m scared.”</p>
<p>He cooed soothing words at her, empty promises that he would visit whenever he could, would have her over some weekends so they could order pizzas and watch cartoons, would go to the zoo or the museum over his winter break. While he said those things, her ears remained inattentive, all sensations pouring instead through her eyes, as water poured out, and as the man tugged gently at her arm, and she screamed and wailed unintelligible words. </p>
<p>Gazing back at Zach, from the disheveled bed, were those same brown eyes and trembling hands. </p>
<p>Maybe it was because of his curiosity about how the boy knew his name and how his glove couldn’t reach any further than the moments when he was rummaging through his cargo. Or maybe it was the fact that he was deprived of sleep and that caused his memories to encroach on his senses, blurring with them, becoming more real than his surroundings. Maybe it was because of the nights they spent together watching Super Guard Squad, or because of the pancakes they flipped together, or because of Pirandello, or the snake he was so excited about. Maybe it was because of his eagerness to talk to Zach, to get him to notice him, to try to impress him with his drawings, to behave like him, even if that meant holding a twig between his middle and pointer fingers. Maybe it was because of his willingness to sleep next to Zach on that twin bed and because he whispered that Zach made him feel safe. Maybe it was because those last two stuttered words he spoke were the last ones Elli said to him. And maybe it was because, somewhere in the depths of his present self, he knew that the boy somehow made him feel more connected with something real, something sincere, something true - not in the sense of clinging to an identity, nor of staking out what he was and sectioning off everything else he knew he was not, nor in the sense of grounding himself to any tangible thing external to himself, nor of grasping at things he could claim he knew, could claim he understood, could claim he was sure were real. It was in the sense of realizing a purpose without understanding why, an awaking of his protective nature, in the sense of knowing that Russell looked up to him, of knowing that he didn’t want to go back to living alone, of knowing that Russell had awakened a part of him he was uncertain of, of knowing that despite his drive to protect his solitude he didn’t really want to leave Russell though he didn’t understand why, of knowing that in some way, when he was taking care of the boy, he was taking care of Elli and Hollis. Maybe it was because they were feelings that, despite all his knowing, were filled more with ambiguity and blurred lines than his mind had ever allowed. And maybe it was because somehow, it was that uncertainty, that knowing that only led to more questions, that not-knowing, that made him feel more real, more true, more alive. And maybe it was because Russell somehow embodied it all. But whatever it was, it compelled Zach to do what he knew would force him to never turn back to his old life. </p>
<p>And assured that the darkness was concealing his eyes and cheeks, he let his emotions pour out of him as he reached for the boy and embraced him, the hug that comforted Russell from his nightmare actually comforting Zach more, and he said, “It’s okay. If you want, I don’t have to leave.”  </p>
<p>Russell whimpered as he buried his face into Zach’s chest and clutched at his shoulders. “Just until I fall asleep again, please?”</p>
<p>“Of course,” Zach muttered, running his fingers through the boy’s messy hair. “Of course.” </p>
<p>Zach held the boy as he rubbed his eyes, fists that firmly gripped Zach’s shirt began to loosen, and his breathing steadied then grew heavy. Holding him like this - like he never had Elli, like Elli had always needed, always longed for, after the deaths of their parents and Hollis - made him realize that he couldn’t return and that he had finally accepted some responsibility. He would take care of the boy, like he had never taken care of Elli. He’d protect him from the system of martyrdom, wait until he could remember relatives, or perhaps, if his memories really had been wiped, find some way of getting them back. </p>
<p>He looked over at Miles who slept soundly, arm resting over his forehead, lips slightly parted, and remembered their conversation back at the gas station about the arc-Hive. Maybe he could finally figure out how the boy knew his name.</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0014"><h2>14. Cranes</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Zach mulled the arc-Hive idea around in his mind all through breakfast as he mulled the oats around in his mouth and as Russell passed him his leftovers, not even half eaten. </p><p>After tidying their room of littered candy wrappers and t-shirts thrown into heaps by both child and tattooed adult, Zach stepped outside to check on the young boy and to light a cigarette in the open air, hoping to sneak in a few puffs before Russell took notice. </p><p>The boy poured over a piece of paper he got out of the cabinet in the library, scrawling with the colored pencils shortened with years of sharpening. </p><p>While Russell colored a picture of green and red woods and a bed of littered green and brown needles, Miles plopped down next to him and took a breath through his own cigarette. “Looks nice,” he said. “I’d like to go there someday.” </p><p>The young boy’s eyes didn’t leave his paper, instead concentrating on the strokes of the branches, the lines of the bark. “Me too.” He bit his lip and squinted his eyes in his determined focus. </p><p>Miles snuffed out his cigarette, reached for a paper, licked his thumb then creased it into a square. “Could use some birds though, don’t ya think?”</p><p>Russell’s eyes now followed the paper sliding in front of the tattooed man who folded it into a diamond, unfolded and refolded its edges, tugged at the paper here and there, smoothed the edges, pulled a flap, then another. He set the creature on top of Russell’s trees, making it dance from one branch to another. </p><p>The boy set down his pencil. “So cool! Show me!”</p><p>Miles grabbed two more pieces of paper, creased them both into perfect squares, and passed one to Russell. “Now don’t be upset if you don’t get it right away. Took me a bunch’a tries to get it right.”</p><p>Zach watched as Russell carefully analyzed Miles who performed each step and then reached over to help the boy mimic each fold, guiding him with his hands and interjecting encouraging words. When the younger boy’s came out crinkly, the older boy laughed it off, grabbed two more papers, and said, “You’ll get it next time.”</p><p>As he watched, Zach thought back to those moments when he would come home from hanging out with his friends while Hollis was still working his shift at one of his two jobs. Elli would be coloring, cutting, gluing, sprinkling glitter, writing on top of newspaper that covered the kitchen table. Hollis had set out scissors and glue sticks and crayons and water paints and construction paper before he left for work. Zach would plop down on the sofa and flick on the tv, sprawling his feet out to the other arm, his shoulders pressed against the other. Elli would rush up to him, holding up her pictures of rabbits in pink dresses and long stick figures of their family of three. She’d ask him to come join her. But it was Sunday, and he just wanted to relax, not have to babysit, not have to pretend he liked drawing or cutting little strips of paper and gluing them into coils. </p><p>Russell held up another crane, proud of it despite its imperfections. Miles secretly brushed his perfectly creased bird aside and applauded the young boy. </p><p>“I wanna show Zach!”</p><p>Zach had been feeling for the lighter in his pocket, and when roused from his memory, he was aware of the warm streaks on his cheeks. He quickly dried them before Russell turned from the picnic bench, small paper crane in hand. “Zach, look!”</p><p>It was the little girl who ran up to him, drawing of rainbows and butterflies and rabbits and lanky figures in her hands, brown curls flouncing round her face, brown eyes not leaving Zach’s no matter where his were focused, usually cast over her forehead at the television. He couldn’t even remember what show had been on, what he had been so intent to watch. A flurry of those butterflies rose in him and caught in his throat, and he swallowed them, now more conscious of the box of cigarettes and lighter in his pocket. </p><p>Zach caught Russell by the shoulders and bent to his level. “Did you make this?”</p><p>Russell nodded, and Zach was grateful the boy’s eyes were fixed on his creation, though he looked over at Miles whose eyes met his directly and who nodded sympathetically. There was no longer a need to hide it from the tattooed man, only from the little boy. Zach quickly wiped away the remnant tears before patting the boy on the shoulder again. </p><p>“So good, Russ! You could probably teach me.”</p><p>“Yeah!” Russell said, taking him by the wrist. “I will, but I might need some help from Miles. He showed me.” </p><p>Miles stood, clearing a spot next to Russell who hurled his legs over the bench and grabbed a piece of paper. “Make it into a square first, right?” the boy said, but Zach heard it only as if from underwater, the gargled words absorbing a softness, a higher pitch, a familiar tone beckoning from a corroded barrier of time, the passage of which was now overlapping with his emotions. Reparations for a past that couldn’t be changed, couldn’t be fixed. When he placed a hand on Russell’s shoulder, he placed a hand on Elli’s, thinking of what could have been had he done the same back then, if memorosurgery and memory witches really could change the past rather than just perceptions of it. Elli would have looked up at him with those bright brown eyes, describe her drawing, explain why his depiction was hunched over, his circle that formed his head remained unclosed while those of the other two were finely outlined, gone over twice, three times, just to ensure the circles were complete. </p><p>He thought of the glove in his duffle bag atop the bed in the room the monastics lent them, suddenly feeling at one with it, in its presence, then embodying its presence, the smooth teeth of the zipper interlocking above him, huddled between his bed t-shirt and protein bar. </p><p>“No, that’s not right,” a young voice echoed from somewhere far off, and it wasn’t until a hand brushed against his that Zach woke to Miles peering over at him, looking concerned. He must have known that a touch would bring him back. </p><p>“Almost,” Miles said, now seated across from Zach and diagonally from the boy, as he reached over to the paper and pointed at a flap. </p><p>“Oh, right. Here, Zach, this one’s for you!” </p><p>Zach held out both his palms as the boy set the paper creature in them. “So cute,” Zach said. “What should I name him?”</p><p>“Her,” Russell corrected. “How about Ranevskaya?”</p><p>Zach chuckled, looking up at Miles, wondering where he got that name. Miles shrugged. </p><p>“Ok, now your turn,” the boy said. </p><p>His laugh now became nervous. “I-I think I’m gonna need your help,” Zach said, unwilling to admit he hadn’t been paying attention. His thoughts now detached from the glove, the cigarette box and lighter, and the little girl who sat at the kitchen table. “You said square, right?”</p><p>“Yeah.” Russell turned toward him, his knee pressing into Zach’s thigh. </p><p>Zach fumbled with the corners and after a long pause, Russell reached over and grabbed an edge. “Like this.”</p><p>He blinked at the paper and examined each of Russell’s movements, each crease in paper, each lilt of the edges. When he completed the crane, Russell clapped his hands, and Zach peered up at Miles who gazed back at him with blue eyes, heavy with adoration, a slight smirk on his lips. “Heh. Look ‘achu.”</p><p>Zach blushed and turned back to Russell. “Here, you can have him too. Or her.”</p><p>“Really? Cool. I’ll name him after you.”</p><p>Miles folded his arms on the table and leaned into them lazily. “They say makin’ a thousand grants a wish.”</p><p>Russell’s eyes widened, and he hastily passed each man a paper. “Bet we could finish before dinner!”</p><p>The two men laughed as Zach rustled the boy’s light brown hair.</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0015"><h2>15. Acceptance</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>The trio broke off after lunch, a young girl having asked Russell to play ball with her and some of the other orphans and Miles taking an interest in some of the books in the library then his attention flitting to the stained-glass windows in the sanctuary. </p>
<p>Zach smoked a cigarette in the yard from a distance, though one of the monastics had asked him not to, as he watched Russell kick around a partially deflated ball and clap hands with the other children, shouting and laughing like he had been part of their temple clan for years. When he noticed the wind started blowing in the direction of the temple, Zach snuffed his cigarette out, judging it was time to talk to Miles about the idea he knew was foolish.</p>
<p>Miles sat in one of the back wooden pews, hunched over his knees, his tattooed arms folded across his lap, rocking back and forth slightly as his head swayed from side to side as if in deep thought or prayer. Zach never thought of Miles as a devotee of any religious sect, but there had always been something within, beyond, those blue eyes that shattered his calm, confident aura; that beckoned from behind that smirk; beyond that smooth, low tone; beyond that ability to smooth over arguments; beyond those words that twisted spats into laughs. Zach supposed he wasn’t far off from religion. </p>
<p>He took a seat next to him, and it was a few moments before Miles became aware of his presence. </p>
<p>When he was younger, Zach sat in pews like these, reached for papers and pencils in the backs of the wooden benches that were packed behind thick books with golden etching. His mother would bring a finger to her lips then turn back to the speaker at the front, nod her head, and scribble down something in her notes. Hollis mimicked her movements, sitting just as piously, hands folded in his lap, feet flat and firmly planted on the tile floor. Zach had asked him later on in life if he believed all that, when Zach started getting interested in the practice his mother had warned him against, the speaker having asserted that the book he spoke from would not have condoned the deletion of memories. Hollis had said that the problem was that the authorities had manipulated the words to be used as weapons against certain people and practices just because they didn’t agree with them but that just because someone in authority manipulated the meaning of the text didn’t mean that the words themselves were bad.</p>
<p>Zach wondered what his parents would think of him, having become a memorosurgeon. Had they known back then what Hollis was going to do as a result of his inner terrors that could have been corrected with a procedure, would they really have criticized it? </p>
<p>Miles patted Zach’s knee, still hunched over his own. “Peaceful, huh?” he whispered, as if there were others around them. </p>
<p>“So…you religious?”</p>
<p>Miles kept his head bowed low, almost between his knees. “Nah but, heh, thinkin’ about it.” He lifted his hands up and gestured at the pool of water at the front, the string of wires coiling above it, the flashing lights that pulsed through them, flickering red then orange then gold. “How can you not?” Finally looking back at Zach, he said, “What about you?”</p>
<p>“Uh,” Zach brushed his nose with the back of his fist. “Not really. My mom was. Too political for me.”</p>
<p>“Yeah, some can be pretty intolerant. But here, I mean look,” he gestured toward the front again, and a martyr stepped through the doorway, carrying a pitcher of water which they placed on a table in front of the pool. “They don’t care who you are. I mean, they didn’t even ask if we were for or against it, just welcomed us in. Don’t impose confession on us like some other places. And did you see that rainbow flag out front?”</p>
<p>“Oh, yeah, that. Pretty cool.”</p>
<p>“Just nice to know there are places like this that accept you, y’know?”</p>
<p>“So, uh,” Zach faltered again, fixing his eyes on Miles’s hands. Next to the wolf on his right hand was a small black symbol. Zach remembered studying Japanese language in college, picking the class because his friends were in it; they had taken a seat at the back and teased the blonde with curly hair and the brunette with cat-eye makeup. He remembered the numbers in kanji. The symbol on Miles’s hand looked almost like the number eight. No, perhaps more like the kanji on signs for entering. Or, could it be Greek? “So you didn’t really date Kick, right?”</p>
<p>Miles laughed and clapped Zach’s knee again, forcing him to move his gaze elsewhere. “His friend, Will, actually. Sweet but it never would have worked out between us.” He finally drew himself out of his hunched position and looked at Zach directly. “Heh, you into Kick?”</p>
<p>“W-what? N-no-"</p>
<p>“Aw, I know, it’s his muscles, isn’t it?”</p>
<p>Zach blushed, suddenly thinking again of his college days. His two friends wanted to set him up with the blonde, and he’d agreed, kissed her at a party even. But whenever she spoke to him in class, he couldn’t help but look beyond her, at the boy who shook his brown hair out of his face, green eyes shifting to the friend sitting next to him as he passed him a rolled up piece of paper. Even when he kissed her, those green eyes surfaced in his mind, that wooden ring round his thumb, the gauges in his ears. Zach frowned, too afraid to follow the memory further. He tried to think instead of his glove. </p>
<p>He was grateful when Miles continued, “I was lucky the people I surrounded myself with were accepting too. What about you?”</p>
<p>“Oh, um, the last person I dated was a girl named Sarah.”</p>
<p>“Heh. Well, what was she like?”</p>
<p>Zach thought back to the days when they dated, to her curly red hair, to her shelves that lined the walls - bookshelves, shelves that had been drilled into the wall, dressers and wardrobes whose tops served as shelves. Shelves that held those succulent plants, both real and fake, ceramic frogs, an old blue and white Dutch tin that held jewelry, a martini glass filled with blue marbles, a silver Statue of Liberty keychain that was too big to attach to a backpack, airport and Broadway tickets from before they even met. He learned about her through asking about those objects. But, as he fumbled for a description of the woman, he realized that he knew more about those trinkets than about her. </p>
<p>“Was alright,” he said at last. “Think she only liked me ‘cause I was a memorosurgeon.”</p>
<p>“Told you,” Miles said with a smirk. “Makes you hot. ‘ts the only reason I stick around you.”</p>
<p>Zach pushed him playfully. “H-hey.”</p>
<p>“I’m just kidding. You’re cute as a trucker too. Bet you’re a real heartbreaker. For both girls and guys.”</p>
<p>Zach sat back, the ethereal light shining through the stained-glass cast in beams on the floor, lighting up the dust particles that shimmered and danced like fireflies. </p>
<p>Miles rocked forward again, elbows on his knees, folded tattooed hands propping up his chin. He didn’t need to come with them, didn’t need to lend Zach his truck, didn’t need to help him look after Russell. He wasn’t wanted for assault, didn’t have a bounty on his head as a marked martyr for the state. And yet he stayed. Stayed, when Sarah pretended she forgot him, when she gave up on him after he gave up his profession. </p>
<p>Miles turned back to him. “What’cha thinkin’?”</p>
<p>Zach blushed. He clenched his trembling hands, trying to redirect his focus on anything other than his fluttering chest. “I-I’m worried about Russell,” he managed, trying to envision the boy kicking around the ball. “He, he knew my name. Is it something I don’t remember? Or both of us? But he knew it. I mean, I guess I had had a few drinks when I first saw him, but I know he said my name. It sobered me. I know I heard it.”</p>
<p>Miles hesitated, moving his hand to his bottom lip, visibly concerned. “Yeah?” </p>
<p>“I-I tried to use my glove to find out how. It was probably wrong, I know, but I mean, how could he know me? I looked the morning after I met him, but there’s nothing even in my journal about it. Now that’s missing too. Could’a sworn I packed it, but maybe it’s still somewhere in our room or at my apartment. I can’t remember clearly without it. But I can’t help but wonder how I might know him, you know?”</p>
<p>“So, what are you sayin’, Zach?” Miles only ever referred to him by his real name when he was serious. </p>
<p>“I’m scared to go back. Inside my memories, I mean. But maybe there’s something there - a way for me to help him. If he doesn’t remember either, then maybe there’s no other way.”</p>
<p>Miles nodded slowly, knowing what Zach was leading up to. “The arc-Hive.”</p>
<p>“The arc-Hive,” Zach confirmed. </p>
<p>Miles’s face lit up, and he clapped him on the shoulder. “My own crazy Don Quixote, coming to those insane ideas all on his own. Now you’re talkin’, my friend. Guess I’ll be Sancho.” </p>
<p>“Man, this is serious. You know what would happen to us if we got caught?” </p>
<p>Miles ignored the question. “You know where it is?”</p>
<p>Zach lowered his voice, though they were now again the only ones in the sanctuary. “Center of the university of memorosurgery. Harriman Tower.” </p>
<p>Miles whistled softly. “Protester central.” </p>
<p>“Yeah, too dangerous to bring Russell along.” </p>
<p>“Nah, that could be our cover. Heh, come to think of it, there’s gonna be a big protest this weekend! We just blend in,” he said, waving his hand through the air as if performing a magic trick, “then you just sneak us into that building.”</p>
<p>“I’d be worried about Russell.”</p>
<p>“Trust the kid, my man,” Miles said, his arm still draped over Zach’s shoulder. “He’s stronger than you think.”</p>
<p>He could be sure of that. Russell had been living alone for who knows how long, without any memory, before Zach found him. </p>
<p>“And Valhalla still has an open gate.”</p>
<p>Zach couldn’t let himself think that far ahead. He had to focus on getting those memories. Whatever he discovered from those would lead him to his next step.</p>
<p>It was a crazy idea, and they both knew it. He’d never read Don Quixote but he heard enough about the story to know that the main character was insane. But he had made a promise in his mind to Russell and, in some ways, he felt, also to Hollis and Elli. The boy needed help, a family, something to ground him in an identity besides two names, something to tell him who he was and where he belonged. </p>
<p>Only memories could do that. He had an obligation, a responsibility, to get them back for him - even if that meant unearthing some things about himself he didn’t want to discover. </p>
<p>Somehow, with Miles, he felt reassured about the whole thing, safer, even if he wasn’t ready yet to admit why.</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0016"><h2>16. No Explanation</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Russell continued to play with the other children long after dinner. In the dim twilight, Zach lit another cigarette in the yard. He left Miles in the library who insisted he’d come join him after he found the book he was looking for. Zach finished his cigarette and dressed two of Russell’s scrapes before Miles finally slid out the door from behind him, holding a small mint green paperback in his right hand and a mechanical pencil between his teeth. </p>
<p>“You look so cute like that,” he said, gritting the writing instrument in his mouth and plopping down next to Zach, “so pensive, heh.”</p>
<p>“Shut up,” Zach laughed it off, not allowing his eyes to leave the sky. He motioned at the book. “Found it?”</p>
<p>Miles patted the cover. “Yep. Benyameen.” </p>
<p>Zach thought he was saying a word in another language, but when he looked at the book with the name “Walter Benjamin” written along the binding, he decided that perhaps it was just a different pronunciation. “Didn’t know a guy like you would be such an avid reader,” he said, battering him playfully with a laugh. </p>
<p>Miles poked back with a smirk. “Bet you didn’t know I wear glasses too.” </p>
<p>Zach frowned in surprise. Though they’d spent the night in the same room, Zach hadn’t seen the tattooed man with glasses, hadn’t even seen a pair on the bathroom counter or the night table. “So, you’re lying every time you say I look cute,” Zach said, daring playful banter. He inwardly assured himself that it was just what friends do. </p>
<p>Miles leaned into Zach, squinting his eyes, lips slightly parted, his breath gently grazing Zach’s, “You’re right. Might need a closer look.”</p>
<p>For a moment, Zach didn’t move, entranced by the possibility of what might happen in the next. Then a fear overtook him, like the fear he felt when one of his old school friends grabbed his phone away from him, teased Zach by holding it over his head, forcing him to draw nearer, and, when their breaths mingled and lingered longer than the echo of words and laughs, that same fear ensnared him - fear of what others might think, fear of his parents finding out, fear of never going back, fear of a future obscured by a series of variables weaving together until each individual is indistinguishable in a blurry haze. The vast, the unknown, overwhelmed him, and he trembled back slightly. </p>
<p>Unfazed by Zach’s reaction, Miles leaned back, his focus now on Russell. “Think he gets along with Marsha best,” he said, pointing at a girl with dark, curly hair. “Heh, said he gave her one of his paper cranes and she showed him how to make a frog.” </p>
<p>Zach thought over the previous nights when his only plan was to leave Russell with the monastics, before those eyes pleaded him not to leave. “Kids really grow on ya, huh?”</p>
<p>“Heh. Yeah.” Leaning on his palms, he peered over at Zach with eyes that burned with intention and passion. “Idea. While he’s still playing, we could hit up a bar again. May be the last time before Valhalla.”</p>
<p>“Not a good idea. I wouldn’t want Russ to know.”</p>
<p>“Russ doesn’t care what we do, heh. ‘sides, I’m paying.”</p>
<p>Still shaken by the previous moment, Zach just nodded, unwilling to verbalize his consent to having a drink. Miles seemed to know just how and when to tempt him. </p>
<p>* * *</p>
<p>The chemical atmosphere tore into Zach, bringing him back to the days when he used fake IDs to get into places like this, when he’d sneak in just to see his friends, or when he was a little older and he’d leave his residency early just because he knew that friend who teased him with his phone would be there, leaning against the bar, a girl with a long ponytail close by and grabbing at those relaxed arms that draped over the wooden counter, begging him to take notice of her. But he’d be staring straight at Zach, smile twitching on his lips, the same way Miles looked at Zach now. </p>
<p>The tattooed man leaned over the bar and yelled something inaudible to the tender who went off to mix some drinks. </p>
<p>Zach tried to relax, to unearth the man he was a few years ago, the one who went to friends’ houses nightly to try a different beer or liquor or part of cannabis, the one who, even a few months ago, would text his resident friends as soon as his shift was over at the clinic, to see if anyone was up for drinks. The thought of Russell suppressed that self, something it should have done when Hollis was no longer around, even when Hollis was around. Having a man who was more immature than him was perhaps a good thing. If Hollis had been less mature, Zach might have seen the need to take more responsibility sooner.  </p>
<p>“Thought we’d never be able to do this again. With Russell around,” Miles breathed into his ear. </p>
<p>The closeness of Miles felt somewhat soothing, and he couldn’t help but think of their earlier conversations in the sanctuary and on the back stoop. When the bartender passed them two lemon drops each, they downed them both, and it was only a few moments before Zach felt the dizzying urge to be held. The feeling wasn’t foreign to him, especially in a crowd of people where he felt more alone than if he had just been drinking in his own apartment. In fact, it was how he had hooked up with Sarah, who’d been leaning over the bar with two of her girlfriends, sipping beer out of a bottle. That was the first thing that attracted him to her - she wasn’t drinking one of those fancy fruity drinks doused with syrup, peppered with sugar, and dressed with cherries and orange slices. He’d been sitting with two of his own friends, nursing beer out of a tumbler, already tipsy from the vodka he downed at his friend’s apartment. His other friend already had that ponytailed blonde after all, so Zach found no harm in making eye contact with the redhaired woman who surveyed the room and stopped when her eyes fell on Zach. Even when her friends spoke to her, she didn’t turn from him, and Zach held the gaze as his friends joked and laughed about the doctors they worked under. He wouldn’t let himself look at the friend who always teased him, and after another beer, he finally made his way over to her, introduced himself and, in another moment, was swept up in a kiss, his eyes fluttering over at his friend before closing. </p>
<p>He turned toward Miles, their eyes met, and a smirk spread across the tattooed man’s face - always confident, despite his crazy ideas, despite his having been the one to plant the arc-Hive idea into Zach’s mind, even if Zach agreed to it. He lingered in the gaze, before realizing it might have been too long, and he quickly turned away, thinking he probably shouldn’t have any more of those lemon drops. </p>
<p>“We can’t let Russell know we were here,” he said finally, more to break himself from his thoughts than to assert his words’ meaning. </p>
<p>“Always thinking about him, heh?” Miles stretched his arm round Zach, clearly affected by the drinks. “That’s what I like about you though, always responsible when I can’t be. But what if he does find out, heh?” Miles asked, again leaning closer to Zach. “No, no, I gotta be more like you. Wish I could be more like you.”</p>
<p>Zach couldn’t help but laugh a little at his babbling. “You don’t want to be like me.” Then his chuckling stopped, and he felt more somber. “I’m only trying to be responsible now because I wasn’t in my past.” </p>
<p>“Oh, right, right. That’s right. Reparations for the past.” He, too, lost his smile. “Always about the past with you memorosurgeons.” He turned toward him, reached his hand up to Zach’s cheek, then quickly brushed it down to his shoulder as if embarrassed for his rash motion. “Zach,” he said, “I’m sorry, I’m so sorry.”</p>
<p>Zach peered down at Miles, who slumped further into the counter, and tried to cling to what was left of his sobriety, to understand what exactly Miles was apologizing for - the hand touching his face? His irresponsibility for and bad influence on Russell? His bringing Zach to a place where he knew he would give into his temptation?      </p>
<p>“Man,” Zach laughed, trying to lighten the mood as he grabbed Miles’s hand and gently lifted it off his shoulder, “don’t tell me you’re wasted already!” </p>
<p>“Right! We need more.” He turned round quickly toward the counter again, waving his hand at the tender, then he put it down just as quickly and said, “No, no, only if you want more.”</p>
<p>Zach chuckled again, admitting to himself that he didn’t like seeing Miles this distraught. “Sure.” </p>
<p>Miles ordered two more then whirled around with them in his hand and passed one to Zach. “To going to the arc-Hive,” he said, holding it up slightly. “And to the lives we’ll start when we get there.” </p>
<p>Zach winced slightly at the thought of the arc-Hive, the fingers that curled round his shot glass suddenly curling round, hooking through, a trigger. Miles’s hands, too, suddenly became his own, the memory of detached hands that somehow belonged to him overlapping with the images he sensed before him that might have been called reality. He tried to lift the glass, but the memory came starkly into focus - his own hands lifting a weapon, that, for once, was not a glove. He thought of the bounty hunter and winced, the resonant images compelling him to move, not mattering how or where, and before clanging his glass against Miles’s, Zach downed the liquid again, hoping that the only time he ever shot a gun was in that alley. </p>
<p>“You good, man?” </p>
<p>Zach wanted to tell him that he wasn’t; that there were flashes of images that kept haunting him; that memories kept playing out on every familiar object and sound; that, even though he had used his glove and ripped a page out of his journal, there were still remnants of an experience; that the only way to dispel those memories was to flood his mind with curiosity about the history of other objects, to ask Sarah where she bought all those trinkets that littered the shelves, to repeat the address of every delivery in his mind, to wonder when the bar might have been built. Zach tried to focus on Miles’s tattoos, trying to come up with a story for each of them in his mind, sure that each inked image held one of Miles’s memories - a wolf that signaled a warning, tiny gears that symbolized his first job, vines that grew round trees that branched out to his hopes for the future. Zach pointed at one of them. “Wanna tell me the story behind one of these?”</p>
<p>“You scientists,” Miles laughed. “Always after an explanation.” </p>
<p>Zach was taken aback by the response, but before he could press further, two women pressed themselves against the bar next to Miles, and after ordering their drinks, the taller woman peered past her friend and leaned over her. “Two cute guys,” she said, her voice barely distinguishable over the base, “all alone. Girls here aren’t good enough for you?”</p>
<p>Her friend with the wild hair reminded him so much of Sarah, but as she eyed him, he felt nothing toward her - save the desire for them to leave.</p>
<p>Without looking at either Zach or the women, Miles laughed and said, “I’ve got all I need right here.” </p>
<p>Zach’s hazy mind frantically searched for meaning in the ambiguous statement. Was he referring to the girls? Or to Zach? Miles was right – Zach was always after an explanation. </p>
<p>The taller woman must have interpreted Miles’s words as the former because she reached over, grabbed Miles’s cheek, and pulled him into her. When Zach saw Miles’s head tilt and lean into the kiss, his desire for the women to leave only increased. </p>
<p>Miles pulled away from her, laughing, the back of his wrist reaching up to his lips. The woman with wild hair moved toward Zach, and she brushed her fingers down his arms. A few months ago he might have leaned toward her; after Sarah broke up with him, he might have reciprocated the touch; a few months ago, he might have kissed her back just because the kiss between Miles and the other woman enraged his thoughts. </p>
<p>And then an arm thread through his own - tattooed hands that wound down his forearm toward his own hands. “Sorry, ladies, I was referring to him.”</p>
<p>The two women immediately backed away, the taller clearly annoyed that he had kissed her then insulted her. </p>
<p>Miles shook his head when they sauntered away. “Sorry about that. She caught me off guard. Heh, I’m already drunk.” </p>
<p>“I don’t mind,” Zach said, though something told him his words were not the truth. “You can talk to her if you want.”</p>
<p>Miles laughed. “Naw, you looked so uncomfortable. Heh, so cute. ‘sides,” and then his tattooed arm held Zach’s tighter, and Zach’s fingers trembled, aching for fingers to clasp round his own. Zach tried to mask those thoughts with the assurance that he was also drunk, and Miles finished his sentence: “I’m more into guys.” </p>
<p>Zach looked over Miles’s smile. He was angry that Miles leaned into the woman’s kiss, but he was too afraid of the unknown to admit why. </p>
<p>“Aw, were you jealous? C’mon, you think I give a shit about her? Heh, I wish it had been you.”</p>
<p>Zach froze. He wanted to laugh it off, but somehow, even with the drink pulsing through his veins, he couldn’t. He fiddled with his empty glass instead. “It’s probably Russell’s bedtime,” he said finally. </p>
<p>“Okay, Mr. Cratchit.” Miles winked, and Zach blushed.</p>
<p>Even at the temple, when they lay down to sleep in their separate twin beds, Zach lay awake mulling it all over. And then he thought of his glove, tucked tightly in his duffle bag, pressed against the zippered pocket that held his razor and shaving gel. He considered deleting the memory of the experience - of the feeling - he felt unsure, afraid, of. He always deleted the memories that kept him up at night - only ever sparing the ones of Elli and Hollis and his parents because those memories reminded him of who he needed to become. But this memory sheathed a blanket of uncertainty over him. He glanced over at Miles who, on the opposite bed, slept soundly. But maybe, with all they drank, he wouldn’t remember it in the morning anyway. And the thought lulled him to sleep.</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0017"><h2>17. Colors</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>The next morning a monastic knocked lightly on their door, and, after peering cautiously into their room, asked if they could speak with Zach and Miles. </p>
<p>“We don’t like to ask anyone to leave,” the monastic said once Zach closed the door. They were unable to meet either man’s gaze. “But we can’t let you stay here any longer.”</p>
<p>Zach swallowed hard. Was it because he disregarded their rule about smoking? Had they found out that they went drinking at a bar the night before? Or maybe, despite the flag out front, they thought that he and Miles were together, and, like so many other religious houses he had been to, they were against it. </p>
<p> The monastic went on, “We’ve received word that each one of you is wanted.”</p>
<p>Now Zach felt nauseated. </p>
<p>They looked Zach in the eyes. “You for assault.” Then they looked at the closed door. “The boy for martyrdom of the State.” And finally, they looked at Miles. “And you-” Miles suddenly flushed, his mouth tight, and his eyes fell frantically to the floor. The monastic looked just as uncomfortable, despite all their training to withstand emotions and reactions. “-also for assault.”</p>
<p>Miles looked up, appearing what Zach judged to be relieved. </p>
<p>“I’m sorry, but we cannot put our temple in danger.”</p>
<p>Zach nodded. “We’ll be out today.” </p>
<p>The monastic bowed in appreciation for the compliance then strolled off. </p>
<p>Zach turned to Miles. “Assault? What’d you do?”</p>
<p>Laughing, Miles raised his hands in mock surrender. “What? You get into bar fights and screw over a bounty hunter but then judge me?”</p>
<p>Zach shook it off and reentered their room.</p>
<p>When Russell woke, Zach packed up their things while Miles fidgeted with his hands, clearly itching for a cigarette. They told the boy they were going to travel again, and though at first, he was sad to leave his new friends, his disappointment quickly turned to excitement when they told him there was going to be a television at the motel where they were going to stay. </p>
<p>Zach tried to give the monastic a few of his remaining tokens before setting off again in Miles’s truck, but they refused, asserting that the travelers needed it more than the temple. </p>
<p>Zach peered out the passenger side window, his fingers twitching in the unobstructed breeze, fumbling in the absence of a cigarette. He gazed down at Russell who sat between the two older men, trying to remind himself why he shouldn’t have one. </p>
<p>“Red one!” Russell cried just as Miles got out the word “Red,” and then the older man laughed. “I said it first,” said the boy. </p>
<p>“Yeah, that one’s yours.”</p>
<p>“Ok, I have tan, black, silver, and red.”</p>
<p>“And I’ve got alien green and royal blue, heh.”</p>
<p>They were playing some game where they claimed a color if they were the first to see a car painted with it. Zach tried to pay attention to the road but fussed some more with his fingers, his mind consumed by his wallet, mentally counting the twelve tokens he had left. That would buy some milk, some apples, maybe a jar of peanut butter, and he had to remember Band-Aids for Russell. Somehow that kid was always getting scratches and scrapes, especially playing with the kids from the temple. There was no way he was going to use his card for fear someone would track him, and Miles’s card was already going to have to cover the motel room. There probably wouldn’t be much left in his bank account. </p>
<p>“Why are aliens green?” Russell asked, kicking his feet back and forth to the ukulele music on the radio. </p>
<p>Still looking at the road, one hand clutching the steering wheel, the other on the windowsill, Miles breathed through his teeth. “Good question.”</p>
<p>“I like the color. But I think it looks more like fern green - like the fern outside on Zach’s porch!”</p>
<p>That was his only living potted plant, given to him by Sarah when she told him that he needed to spruce up his apartment; she said she got it on her trip to Idaho, said that since it lived all that time in her car, it would survive in Zach’s care. It was probably dead now. </p>
<p>“Oh,” Russell continued, “do you think we could stop and get stuff to make pancakes? Zach makes the best pancakes.”</p>
<p>“Does he? Why you holdin’ back on me, chef?”</p>
<p>Zach laughed, aware of the nervousness that seeped through his lips. “Where am I going to cook them?”</p>
<p>“The motel, right?” said Russell.</p>
<p>“It’s not one of those motels,” Zach said before realizing the boy probably didn’t know any other motels to compare it to. “Just won’t have a kitchen.” </p>
<p>“Oh,” Russell said disappointedly. “What will it have then?”</p>
<p>Zach turned to him and conjured as big a smile as he could. “It’ll be fun. I promise.” He thought about mentioning a pool but wasn’t sure if they’d even be able to afford a motel with one. His fingers fidgeted even more. </p>
<p>Miles glanced over at Zach’s smile and burst out in a laugh. “Heh! Your face couldn’t lie if you tried!”</p>
<p>“Wh-what? Come on, man,” he said, reaching over Russell to shove Miles’s shoulder playfully.  </p>
<p>The two men broke into laughter with Russell following shortly after to mimic their behavior. </p>
<p>* * *</p>
<p>When Miles asked for a room and passed his card to the heavyset woman peering over the glasses resting on her nose, she eyed Zach as he tried to contain Russell who was grasping at every travel brochure and guidebook he could reach. With Russell’s dirty blonde hair, he did not look so dissimilar from Miles, but Zach knew his black hair and tan skin didn’t look at all like the other two. Still, he wondered if the woman thought they might be a family; Russell could have passed for Miles’s son, Zach his partner. Until recently, the thought might have bothered Zach. </p>
<p>“Yeah, just two beds,” Miles said, looking over at Zach and winking. </p>
<p>Zach couldn’t help but laugh and roll his eyes all at once, the two reactions perhaps a response to avoid his own perception of his heating cheats. “Russell, put that one back.”</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0018"><h2>18. Aberrant</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Their room was on the first level with a small porch and sliding door out which Zach was grateful he might be able to try to smoke without Russell seeing. The motel was nestled in between a few rundown shops, but what it lacked in modernity, it made up for in nature - beyond the parking lot was a glade surrounded by woods and void of any streetlights, and he judged it to be the perfect place to steal a smoke during the night.</p>
<p>The monastics had insisted on sending the boys off with some food so they ate the apples for lunch and saved the cucumber sandwiches for dinner which they ate while Miles commented that he would never be able to become a martyr if only because he couldn’t go without meat. Zach felt the same but said nothing for fear it would make him seem ungrateful in front of Russell. </p>
<p>When Russell at last fell asleep while watching his cartoons of dancing dragons and armored gorillas, Zach flicked the remote to change the channel and sat down on his bed, careful not to wake Russell. </p>
<p>Their plan was crazy - chasing a memory he deemed unfit to remember, all when he tried so hard to forget. People commit things to memory, commit themselves to memory. Knowledge is memory; relationships are built on memory; choices influenced by memory; perceptions, interpretations, determined by memory. For years, humans perfected the memory, designed supplements to enhance it, doubling transistors on microchips every two years, trying to squeeze as much memory into as a small a molecule as possible, working on implanting chips in skulls so that everything could be recorded and remembered, even after death. </p>
<p>Until a man, a scientist, claimed that forgetting was just as necessary as remembering, and he started researching ways of targeting specific memories, deleting them, started experimenting with chips that absorbed memories rather than dispersing them. And he gained a following - by people who realized that they had all been doing the wrong research all along, that while implanting memories and creating greater capacities for memories could create humans of divine intelligence, memory deletion could save the lives of humans who could never transcend their mortality no matter how many years of life they could store in their brains. And what later became known as memorosurgery could cure the basest of human killers: memories that instigated murderers and thieves; memories that crawled out from under the bed at night, stealing sleep, driving brains to insanity; memories causing fear, detachment, irrationality; memories causing self-harm. By manipulating what memories were stored in the mind’s repository, by manipulating the absence of memories, one could control the self, could cultivate the self that one wanted to become - like a plant that grows wild but is refined and sculpted and deliberately structured into a work predesigned from a blueprint by clipping away unwanted leaves and branches. It was a hack into refining one’s identity with one’s own hand.</p>
<p>He had cleaved off part of himself with the intention of creating a self he deemed fit to reveal to society, a self he deemed idealized. And now, because of a kid who knew his name, he was chasing after that memory, not knowing what kind of person remembering it would turn him into. He didn’t remember being connected with a child; he hoped it was nothing more than an encounter he had with a patient during his residency. But flashes of flailing arms, of screams, of a gun in a set of hands that were somehow both his own and not, raced through his mind. </p>
<p>Miles lay on the opposite bed, his ankles crossed as he paddled his feet back and forth, like a child. Did he really never care about anything? Or was he just always tweaked on some substance? </p>
<p>When a red bar flashed across the tv screen, the man stopped paddling and clicked his tongue. A woman with a microphone, standing in front of a laboratory, spoke about the capture of another man with the Brand, saying that he would be monitored, sedated, suppressed, and experimented on. She said that memorosurgery companies were now employing people to hunt these people so that the public could rest without fear that these Aberrants were on the loose. </p>
<p>“Geez. Another witch,” Zach said, remembering the annual classes on how to protect himself if he ever encountered one - usually involving lots of tranquilizers. “How many of ‘em are there?”</p>
<p>Miles cleared his throat. “‘Witch’? How do you think he feels?”</p>
<p>“Probably not much,” Zach said, venturing a joke. </p>
<p>“How is his power any different from what you used to do?”</p>
<p>Zach felt himself weighing heavier on the bed. He had never seen Miles offended before. Whether someone was for memorosurgery or against it, they were afraid of memory witches - the few mutants who could, with a wave of their hand, reach into the depths of memories and change them - not delete them – could make someone believe something that never happened, reconfigure the memory, mind control. They were the most dangerous of all criminals. They were never classified as anything other. He couldn’t believe Miles was defending the witch. </p>
<p>“Well,” Zach started to say, thinking hard about Miles’s question, “we delete memories because it’s the patient’s choice. The patient manipulates their own identity; the Aberrant manipulates someone else’s. They can’t be trusted.”</p>
<p>“How else could they survive when everyone else hates them? They didn’t choose to be born with the Brand. What if you were?”</p>
<p>Zach never thought about being someone else, inhabiting someone else’s thoughts; he always wanted to block them out, to suppress what it might be like to be Hollis, convincing himself he didn’t have to because he wasn’t the oldest. “I guess I’d be scared.”</p>
<p>“Now imagine how afraid they must be.”</p>
<p>The newscaster applauded the man for capturing the witch, amplifying how much better it was now that he was not at large, supposedly obstructing people’s minds, controlling them for their own gain. Zach looked down at his own wrist - clean flesh, though scathed with scars from moving heavy packages from cargo bed to doorstep. He imagined the terror the few other memory witches - no, Aberrants - might feel as they watched the news: perhaps the same as he had when he saw demands to find the assailant, perhaps the same as when he saw the ad marking Russell for martyrdom. Perhaps the same as when he endured the ridicule by those who felt memorosurgery was unethical. But he had been able to coax himself by flooding his mind with the views of those who supported it. No one supported witches - beings that perhaps couldn’t be trusted, but still had a right to live without sedation, without being robbed of everything that built up their sense of self. </p>
<p>“You knew one?” Zach asked.</p>
<p>Miles nodded. </p>
<p>“Didn’t you question- How did you trust them?”</p>
<p>“Heh, I feel like it’s no different roomin’ with you.” He motioned toward Zach’s duffle bag. “How do I know you’re not taking my memories?”</p>
<p>“You know that your choices are your own.”</p>
<p>“Maybe only because I forgot my other responsibilities. You trust yourself? How do you know you didn’t take my memories?”</p>
<p>Zach thought of the glove in his bag then of the scraps of paper he started compiling as a makeshift journal. “I write everything down. With my journal, I rip something out if I want it gone, but I know something’s gone by the missing page.”</p>
<p>“But you lost your journal.”</p>
<p>Every time he remembered that, Zach felt panicked and tried to console himself with the thought of that temporary stack of notes he stapled together. Zach felt the need to look at this external memory, pages recorded with the contents of his days, thoughts he had, interpretations of life’s moments, predictions of the future. Suppose he did take Miles’s memories? Suppose he then took his own, without documenting it? Suppose he wiped them both of any memories of him ever taking either of their memories?</p>
<p>“Ok, I get it. Why trust me then?”</p>
<p>“Aw, Bashmachkin, there’s always something to worry about, heh.”</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0019"><h2>19. Branded</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>The news droned on for another hour or two as Russell slept curled next to Zach and Miles lay on the opposite bed, ankles crossed with his arms over his gently rising rib cage. Zach didn’t hear any of the anchormen and women speaking; their mouths opened with unintelligible sounds that echoed and reverberated through his mind, pulsing through memories and feelings, tearing through a past that weaved itself behind his eyes. When Zach looked over at Miles and noticed his eyes were finally shut, he slid out from his bed, grabbed his cigarette pack and lighter and crept out the sliding door. The cool night air clawed him back to reality as he waded through the grass to the glade and finally lit up when he was far enough away. </p>
<p>When Zach was just about to light another, he heard a voice from behind him. “Whatcha thinkin’ about, Whitman?” </p>
<p>Zach unwrapped his arms from his knees and looked over as Miles knelt down next to him, handing him a can of beer. “Always keep one or two six-packs lying around in my cabin for nights like these, heh.” </p>
<p>Zach shook his hand at it. </p>
<p>“Oh, come on, Russ’s asleep.”</p>
<p>Zach relented, grabbing the can, and Miles took a sip from his own, gazing at the patch of sky amidst the nondescript trees cast in the shadows of night. He took comfort in Russell being safely tucked away from any influential behaviors and lifted the pull tab before taking a drink. </p>
<p>“Breeze is nice,” Miles said, and Zach hummed in agreement. “This were another time and place, I’d be playing a drinking game right now. Nice having a break from trucking though.”</p>
<p>“How’d you get into it?”</p>
<p>“‘member Kick? Think I mentioned his friend, Will, who hooked me up. He used to work with me in the memory dealing biz.” He took a sip, not meeting Zach’s gaze. “Yep, served time for that too. Only thing I grew up knowing how to do; my dad taught me. How he died too. Shot during a carry.”</p>
<p>“Damn. I’m sorry.”</p>
<p>“Don’t know what I expected.”</p>
<p>“I guess if they just legalized it, it would prevent stuff like that.”</p>
<p>“Taxes, moderating prices. Nah, he would’a just moved to drugs.”</p>
<p>Miles turned to look at Zach, his tattooed hand resting over his one knee, his other leg outstretched. “What do you think? They should legalize it?”</p>
<p>“I don’t know. You know, all these protests. Don’t know what side I’m on anymore. That memory I told you I took before I moved to Oakridge? Something just left a bad taste in my mouth, you know? But even in my journal, I don’t have anything about it, just a note telling me to get the fuck out of there and out of that line of work. My girlfriend cut me off after that and my grandmother has dementia. There was nothing left for me in Portland.”</p>
<p>“Heh, and here we are.”</p>
<p>Zach swung his head back to drink. “Heh, yeah.”</p>
<p>“So how’d you get into memorosurgery? Remember that?”</p>
<p>“Yeah, my parents died in a car accident when I was sixteen. My older brother passed away a year later. Think if he had gotten memorotherapy, he might not-” He quickly took another sip of beer. “It might not have happened.”</p>
<p>“Man, I’m sorry. Life’s a bitch, isn’t it?” Miles sloshed his can around and hesitated before speaking, “You ever thought of like, getting rid of those memories?”</p>
<p>“Yeah. Every day. But they drove me to become a memorosurgeon. Thought it would help me protect my little sister.”</p>
<p>“Elli?”</p>
<p>Zach nodded before taking another sip. How often had he gotten drunk before with Miles that he couldn’t remember ever having telling Miles her name? When Zach finished his can and set it down, already feeling a buzz, Miles produced another. Thoughts of Elli compelled him to reach for it, thumb its tab, and take another draught. </p>
<p>“Those Aberrants could help,” Miles suggested before taking another cautious drink as he peered at Zach over the can. He swallowed hard, and his voice was unusually unsteady as he waved his hands around and smiled, almost as if to hide it. “Could keep the memory but make it what you want. Wouldn’t have to remember all the bad stuff.” </p>
<p>His speech submitted to the beer and no longer registered delay after his thoughts, “I’d still be afraid to trust them.”</p>
<p>“How come?”</p>
<p>Zach laughed, the drink compelling him to lighten the mood. “Ingrained in me, I guess. You know, a requirement in memorosurgery school was learning to deal with them.” </p>
<p>Miles set down his can, moved his right hand in front of Zach, turned his right-hand palm up, and peeled back his leather strap. Staring back at Zach was a circular birthmark. </p>
<p>“Holy sh-” Zach reeled backward, spilling some of his drink. He looked up at Miles who gazed back him with his glistening blue eyes that, for once, weren’t smiling. “I-is that-?” </p>
<p>Miles put his hand on Zach’s knee before Zach bolted up, as if towering over him would give him any power over the man who could manipulate memories.</p>
<p>“C-calm down, Candide,” Miles said, holding his hands up, fingers spread widely apart. </p>
<p>Zach dropped his beer can, his hands itching for a weapon, the gun he left in his duffle bag, his glove. “Hands up,” his professors had always warned, “fingers outstretched,” memory witches entered the brain the same way memorosurgeons did - only they didn’t have to touch the skull. </p>
<p>Zach fumbled for his footing, not knowing whether to run or fight. Miles frantically looked from Zach’s gaze to his own hands then forced them down on the ground. “I didn’t- I’m not gonna do anything to you, Zach.” </p>
<p>Hearing his own name calmed him, and he blinked at Miles, letting the buzz from the beer settle over him again. </p>
<p>Miles stared into Zach’s eyes without blinking, his palms firmly planted on the ground. “I-I’d never do anything to hurt you.”</p>
<p>It was crazy to trust him. Everything he knew up until that point could be a lie; there was now even a possibility that Miles had just kidnapped him and had fed every single memory he ever had into him to keep him there. </p>
<p>“Look, I get it. But I trusted you even though you’re a surgeon, right? You coulda wiped me any chance you got, and I’d have had no choice but to believe every word you said upon my waking. Still could if you wanted to. B-but I trust you.”</p>
<p>Zach just blinked at him. </p>
<p>“Besides, my hands aren’t goin’ anywhere. If I didn’t want you to know I have it, I could have just used my power to rework that memory. The fact that you know I’m an Aberrant should assure you that I haven’t used my power on you.” </p>
<p>Miles trusted Zach enough to tell him who he really was, what he really was. That alone was reason to believe that he wouldn’t, hadn’t, manipulated his memories. No memory witch, or Aberrant, would reveal themselves to someone they were manipulating. </p>
<p>His hands still shaking, Zach sat back down next to him. Miles lifted his hands, then looked at Zach and nodded toward the six pack he had brought with him, as if asking for permission to move his hands. When Zach reached out his hand, Miles passed him another. </p>
<p>Zach popped his tab and took a cautious sip. “I’m sorry. Calling that man - you,” he sputtered, “calling them witches.”</p>
<p>“I get it a lot.”</p>
<p>“I used to get ‘mindfuck-up’ when I worked as a memorosurgeon.” He took a sip, shifting his eyes over to Miles, then swallowed quickly saying, “S-sorry, you know I probably deserved that. You definitely didn’t. I mean I had a choice. I-I mean… I’m sorry, I never met an Aberrant.”</p>
<p>“Yeah,” Miles sighed, “sucks doesn’t it?”</p>
<p>Zach frowned. “You mean, you’d rather not have it?”</p>
<p>“I mean, how would you feel?”</p>
<p>“But you’re like all-powerful, right?”</p>
<p>“Well, to a few people at a time. I can’t take on an army. And everyone either hates me or exploits me.”</p>
<p>“You may be a pain sometimes,” Zach said, taking another drink nervously, “but I don’t hate you.”</p>
<p>“Heh, thanks, Orsino. Still wish I wasn’t born with it, you know? Started showing up when I was around thirteen. My dad, heh, he thought it’d be good for business, would take me along on his heists so he could steal memories from other dealers without them remembering. Heh, I was just an instrument for him.”    </p>
<p>“Man, I’m so sorry.”</p>
<p>“I just learned to hide it, you know? Bunch’a tattoos help, wristbands. I mean, Kick mentioned he and I were still dealing memories. I used it for that sometimes and to get out of a bind. But I’m not molding my life around it, yeah? Other than my dad, you’re the first to know. Well, and my brother.” </p>
<p>“I’m sorry I acted the way I did earlier with the news.”</p>
<p>Miles patted his left hand on Zach’s knee while taking a sip of his beer with his right.</p>
<p>Zach took a few breaths, deciding if he should offer what he said next, “I know it’s not the same, but I sorta know what it’s like to not want to reveal something for fear others might,” he faltered a moment, searching for the right word, “not approve.”</p>
<p>Still holding his beer, Miles turned toward him, his eyes dancing between both of Zach’s, the curl of his smirk barely visible in the night as his face inched closer and closer. “And what’s that, Dorian?” Miles asked with a playful lilt. </p>
<p>Zach blinked at the distance, the space between them, or perhaps noticed more the lack of it. His breath caught in his throat as his heart thumped. His nervousness forced him to turn toward his drink again as he stumbled over his words, “W-well, you know, my p-parents didn’t like memorosurgeons.” </p>
<p>“Heh, you’re so cute,” Miles said, and Zach blushed.</p>
<p>He fumbled with his can as he peered over at Miles’s bare wrist which had a thick indent from where his leather wristband had always wrapped round it. He wasn’t sure if it was the beer or some other incipient feeling, but, for all the warnings from his professors and the doctors he worked under, somehow, he wasn’t afraid of that mark. He couldn’t imagine the ridicule Miles might have received for being born with that mutant DNA - genetic code that had developed to combat all the inorganic manipulation humans were trying to implement in the brain - but he knew that if he had been born with the same Brand, he wouldn’t have been so cheerful. Sure, Miles was hyped up on drugs and alcohol and nicotine most of the time, but even still, his outlook was more optimistic than Zach’s. And he seemed to genuinely care about Zach’s and Russell’s wellbeing. He had no attachment to either of them, yet he was letting Zach use his truck and his credit card, now even his beer. He might not have been the best influence on Russell in his life choices, but, in some ways, he was a better role model. If only Zach had behaved the same with Hollis and Elli. He didn’t have to be the best, the cleanest, brother. He just had to be there. But he had used those substances to escape rather than be present. And to Hollis and Elli, in those moments, it must have seemed like he hadn’t even existed.</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0020"><h2>20. Nicknames</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>In the morning, Zach woke and refrained from opening the curtains or turning on any lights to avoid waking Russell and Miles. He splashed water on his face to bring himself out of his early morning haze - flashes of sounds and images still resounding from far off, from the depths of his mind that always roused to haunt him late at night. He tried not to look at his hands, the parts of him most seeded with those thoughts, that always flickered between his own hands and someone else’s - memories that lingered because within them remained a yet unearthed truth. He tried to assure himself that he would never kill anyone, that he never did. </p>
<p>Perhaps it was a result of the consecutive restless nights or because of the constant weighing worry about Russell, but he looked older and his countenance seemed almost estranged, distant, like the image before him was as far off from him as the space between them. Feelings had surfaced in him that he had never had before, or, perhaps never wanted to admit. Feelings of responsibility for the boy in the adjacent room, a drive to protect him, provide for him, ensure he was safe, and, even though he was easily tempted, a drive to be a good influence on him; all feelings he should have had with Elli. He peered into his own brown eyes. He reminded himself of Hollis. If only he could be a shred of who he was. </p>
<p>And then he thought of Miles. Even if he was a bad influence, Zach loved joking with him, in basking in his carefree nature. And then there were other feelings, feelings akin to those he had during his school days and throughout his residency but that he never was ready to admit to himself. He splashed more water on his face in an attempt to douse the thoughts. Miles was a good person at heart, Zach told himself; that was all it was, he assured himself. </p>
<p>He slipped out the room to the lobby where the motel staff had set out paper bowls and cups, spickets for hot water and coffee, a basket of fruit and another of oatmeal packets. He grabbed three different flavors: cinnamon apple, strawberry, and maple brown sugar, deciding that he would let Russell pick which one he’d like best and then eat whatever Miles didn’t want. Then he poured two cups of coffee and pocketed three apples, remembering this time that Russell didn’t like bananas. </p>
<p>He went out on the porch, looking out at the glade and sipping his coffee, grateful to have something to fidget with other than a cigarette or glass. Miles showed him the Brand on his wrist - the mark that designated him as a public enemy, as a being he’d always been taught to fear, even by his parents - a manifestation of the “immoral” practice of memorosurgery. He’d never met an Aberrant before, but somehow, he trusted Miles. He thought of the lack of distance between them the night before, of those many nights when Miles would lean in toward him with a smirk, teasing him, poking his side.<br/>Perhaps those strange feelings were the cause of his trust. A part of him told him to be cautious of him, to treat him the way he had always been taught to treat an Aberrant. But those feelings told him to just let go of the fear. And he listened. </p>
<p>“Mornin’, Peer Gynt,” came a groggy voice from behind him. It was deeper than normal, and cracked between syllables, the dreamworld still catching in his throat. </p>
<p>“Oh, um, morning. I left you a coffee on the tv stand.”</p>
<p>Miles placed a hand on Zach’s shoulder, and he trembled a little at the contact. “Kid’s still asleep. Heh, wish I could sleep a full night through like that.”</p>
<p>“Hope I didn’t wake you going out last night.” </p>
<p>“Nah, I have trouble sleeping anyway. ‘t’s when I do most of my reading, usually.”</p>
<p>“That where you get all your nicknames?” Zach asked, still finding it somewhat hard to believe that the tattooed man was so well-versed in highbrow literature.  </p>
<p>“Heh, yeah. Just characters, authors. People that don’t judge, y’know?”</p>
<p>Zach thought back to those parties he used to go to, during his school years and when he worked as a memorosurgeon, parties he’d attend with Sarah to meet her friends. He’d always have a few shots, mostly to take the edge off his nerves around new people, and he could never refuse when offered another. And when they started laughing and talking, about people they’d dated, substances they’d tried, or experiences they had years into the past, he’d fall off somewhere, into the striped curtains, the metal lamp, the books sprawled out on the coffee table, classics he should have read in high school. And somewhere amongst those objects, those trinkets, those leaves of paper that never changed their inked words, he’d wish he was alone. There was something about the voices’ continual references to the past - their continual asking about and projecting comments and interpretations onto it - that unsettled him. And so, he allowed himself to be swept up into those objects positioned round the house. </p>
<p>“Yeah, I think I know what you mean.”</p>
<p>“This is gross!” came a voice from behind them, and Zach turned to Russell peaking his head out the sliding door, holding the paper cup with the plastic lid. “This mud?”</p>
<p>“That’s because it’s not for you,” Miles said, laughing as he swiped it out of his hand.</p>
<p>The boy carefully closed the door behind him. “That what you drink at night?”</p>
<p>“This is why I don’t let you try my stuff,” Zach laughed. </p>
<p>“I’m hungry. Are the apples washed?”</p>
<p>“Should be. Let me help you with the oatmeal.”  </p>
<p>“Can I have the strawberry one?”</p>
<p>Zach followed Russell back into their room, and, when he looked back at Miles, he caught him eyeing him with a smirk that turned into a chuckle. “And you say I spoil him.”</p>
<p>They ate their oatmeal and apples while cartoons played on the tv. As the clock blinked beyond the motel’s checkout time, Zach couldn’t help but feel guilty that Miles’s card would have to pay for another night. He wished they could just go back to one of the temples, wished that none of them were wanted. Miles had been all too happy to hand over his card for the luxury of thicker mattresses and their own bathroom, saying that it was only a few more days until the protest and that his bank account would be able to cover it, waving his hands around as he spouted on about how they’d be able to go to Valhalla after they got the memories they needed, and that they’d be able to cut the card up when they got there. Zach had always just nodded mechanically and thanked him for paying for the room. </p>
<p>After Russell set his bowl down and crawled to the edge of the bed to get closer to the screen, Zach peered down at his own empty bowl. “We have to figure out dinner. For tonight and the rest of the week.”</p>
<p>“We passed a mart on the way here.” </p>
<p>Zach mentally counted those twelve tokens he kept in his duffle bag. “Yeah.”</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0021"><h2>21. Old Habits</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>The windchime rattled on their way into the minimart, and before Zach could even pick up a handcart, Russell was already tearing off down the aisles searching for the toys. In another moment, the boy ran up to Zach holding a plastic wrapped robot modeled after one from his cartoons. “Can I have this? Please?”</p>
<p>Zach almost blurted out “no,” but the boy’s eyes convinced him to check the price, after which he then blurted out his dissent.</p>
<p>He went off to the health care aisle while Miles occupied the boy’s attention, and Zach placed the store brand band-aides in his cart, thinking afterward that Hollis would have done the same to save some money. Along with a half-gallon of milk, a jar of peanut butter, a loaf of bread, and a small box of plastic utensils, Zach figured he would have two or three tokens left and decided that in the morning, he would grab more packets of oatmeal and fruit than they could eat in one sitting. </p>
<p>At the checkout, he eyed the packs of cigarettes on the wall, remembering his own diminishing stash, and his hands began to fidget. The tension compelled him down the toy aisle, glad to discover that Russell and Miles were no longer there, and he put a bottle of bubbles in his basket.</p>
<p>Before Zach could pay, Russell ran up to him with a giant cinnamon roll, like the ones he ate from the back of Zach’s truck. “I liked these!” he said, holding it up to him. “Better than the oatmeal.” </p>
<p>Zach looked at the sticker. “No way. It’s three tokens.” Then when Russell pouted in disappointment, Zach softened, “Sorry, little man.”  </p>
<p>Zach paid the cashier and pocketed his two tokens of change and told Russell and Miles that he’d wait for them outside, hoping that they would take the hint and follow him. </p>
<p>He checked his watch and peered back in the glass windows, still holding his plastic bags. </p>
<p>When they finally came out, they nearly tumbled over one another, giggling and patting their shirts and pockets. Miles waved them both over to his truck, and Zach was all too grateful to be relieved of his burden of parcels. </p>
<p>Miles pulled on the main road when Russell looked up at him. “Can I eat it now?”</p>
<p>“Uh. Still stealth mission.”</p>
<p>“Aww,” Russell pouted, but then he reached over to Miles’s pocket, and before Miles could get out the words, “Not now,” the boy pulled out a robot action figure, released from its plastic confine.</p>
<p>“H-hey, where’d you get that? Miles?”</p>
<p>“Aw, c’mon. How can you deny that face?”</p>
<p>Zach shook his head into his palm. </p>
<p>“Now he knows, can I eat it?” Russell asked, now producing the cinnamon roll from his own pocket. </p>
<p>“Hey, you do that on purpose?” Miles asked, laughing. “Gettin’ me in trouble?”</p>
<p>“Dude, this isn’t a joke. Look what you taught him!”</p>
<p>“Chill. Who gets mad at a thief who steals because he’s hungry?”</p>
<p>Zach thought he heard those words before - once when he was hiding behind pews and golden etched books. </p>
<p>“Heh. You look so cute when you’re angry.”</p>
<p>Zach shook his head again and buried his face in his hands which only prompted Miles to laugh more. </p>
<p>Russell took a few more wrapped goods from his pockets and held them up to Zach in his open hands, revealing several frozen egg rolls of different varieties. “Look!” </p>
<p>Zach blinked at them but couldn’t deny that he’d rather eat them than peanut butter sandwiches and oatmeal packets for every meal until the protest. He looked over at Miles who peered back at him sheepishly. And then he thought of the news caster who reported on the arrested Aberrant the previous night. The whole world was against this man - might that alone give him the right to steal from the people who oppressed him? Perhaps morality was not all black and white, especially when everything that contributes to the system that defines it is against him. Zach tried to imagine himself in Miles’s position; if he had the Brand, he might not have been so dissimilar. “But really - the toy?”</p>
<p>“Kid needs something to play with in Valhalla.” </p>
<p>Russell bounced the robot on his knees. “Yeah!”</p>
<p>Zach wanted to go back to the store, to give him his remaining tokens, but even that wouldn’t cover the cost, and it would leave him penniless. “You owe me a bath then.” </p>
<p>“His name is Capek,” Russell said, ignoring him. </p>
<p>“You two and your weird names. Well, just make sure Capek doesn’t go in the tub with you.” Zach ran his fingers over the metal screws in the joints of the toy. “Might rust.” He couldn’t help think back to the summer night when Elli bothered him with a rusted toy - well, at the time, it felt like a bother - he was too far gone to care that the wheels on the little car, that had been a hand-me-down from either him or Hollis, didn’t work. She had left it on the rim of the tub after each trip to the bath, always the one upstairs - Zach never let either of them use the downstairs bath after what happened in there. But he was too far gone to care about her tears. He saw now that all he needed to do was comfort her.</p>
<p>He looked at Russell who whirled the toy in the air, Miles chuckling at him as his tattooed arms lay loosely over the steering wheel. He wished he could have been there for Elli, for Hollis. He might have been able to prevent their family trio from being torn any further. But the past had already been sewn into a pattern, and the only thing left to do was to change his perception of it, to see blue where the colors were red, to focus on the tightly woven threads and to avert his eyes, to blind himself, from the tattered seams. Or maybe, like Miles had suggested, the Fates were giving him a second chance - spooling out a similar pattern to see if, this time, he might sew the tapestry he was meant to weave. </p>
<p>He patted the boy’s knee, as he peered out the passenger window at the sky spackled with blossoming cumulonimbus. It was a second chance, he assured himself, and this time, he would learn from his past.</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0022"><h2>22. No Escape</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Since Zach knew those clouds foreboded incipient rain, after they ate their microwaved egg rolls and Zach cleaned up their mess, he retrieved one of the items from his plastic bags while Miles hopped in the shower. “I’m going out for a smoke,” Zach said, stepping toward the sliding door, feeling the item in his sweatshirt pocket. “Russell?”</p>
<p>Russell scrambled to his feet and rushed toward the door, no doubt excited that Zach might finally allow him some nicotine. </p>
<p>When they both stepped out, Russell bounced on his heels, gazing longingly at Zach’s pocket, and Zach produced two wands and a small bottle.</p>
<p>“That’s not a smoke,” Russell pouted. </p>
<p>“No, this is better for you.” He opened the cap of the liquid then dipped in one of the wands, lifted it to his face, and blew. The bubbles danced round Russell’s head before popping in his hair. </p>
<p>Russell giggled and grabbed for a wand, whipping it out carelessly and spilling some of the soap on Zach’s shirt. “Watch this!” He pursed his lips to the wand, the soap bubble growing, then popping in his face. “Aww!”</p>
<p>Zach lifted Russell’s elbow. “A little slower. Even.” Holding the wand in front of his face to show the boy, he breathed out evenly; the bubble grew then lifted off before popping in the air shortly after.</p>
<p>Russell tried to imitate Zach but sputtered, the bubble popping on his face again. “Whatever.”</p>
<p>“You’ll get it. Give it another try.”</p>
<p>He tried again to no avail. But when Zach nodded at him, he pressed his lips together once more, and this time, the large bubble lifted above them. “Oh! I did it!”</p>
<p>Zach rubbed the boy’s knee, then went back to blowing bubbles, in his mind pretending it was a cigarette. He looked over at Russell who was now happily waving his wand around, leaving a trail of bubbles in the night air. He smiled and breathed out a steady stream of bubbles thinking that the shimmering globes dancing against Russell’s dark hair made a prettier picture than the solitary trail of smoke. </p>
<p>***</p>
<p>When Miles emerged with a towel wrapped round his neck, leaving a stain on the rim of his oversized t-shirt, he laughed at them, crossing his arms as he leaned against the sliding door. He held out a half-empty pack of cigarettes to Zach. </p>
<p>“Nah, man,” Zach said, chuckling as he held out his want to the tattooed hands. “You gotta try this.” </p>
<p>“You sure? Looks like it’s gonna rain.”</p>
<p>“Miles! Look what I can do!”</p>
<p>Miles whistled. “Wow! Zach taught you that?” he asked, winking at Zach. </p>
<p>“Yeah! Can I teach you?” He grabbed the wand that Zach was still offering to Miles and thrust it at the tattooed man. “Here. You just have to breathe slow and even. Like this.” </p>
<p>“Alright, Bubble-Boy,” said Zach, “but after this you gotta take a bath.” </p>
<p>They stayed out on the porch until the clouds began to cast out their burden and when the jar of bubbles was more than three-fourths gone. </p>
<p>Zach drew a bath for Russell, and it started to pour - one of those passing summer thunderstorms when the wind curtails the torrents this way and that, rendering umbrellas useless. He peered out at the glade he always judged far enough away from their room that Russell wouldn’t be able to smell the smoke. “Can’t go out for a cigarette now,” Zach said, his hands in his jean pockets as he looked out the sliding door at the storm. Remembering his lack of tokens and the price of packs at the minimart, he conceded that it was probably better this way, even if it was the only moment he would get out of Russell’s eye. </p>
<p>Miles stretched on his own bed. “I mean, there’s plenty to do indoors, Henry David,” he teased.</p>
<p>“I’m sick of watching the news.” </p>
<p>Miles nodded then reached into his bag and pulled out two cans, held one out to him. Zach waved his hand at it. “Not in here. Don’t want Russell to see.”</p>
<p>When Miles put both cans back, Zach took a seat on the bed opposite and leaned over his knees. “Miles, you’re a good guy. Just maybe shouldn’t teach him to steal.” </p>
<p>Being a parent, a guardian, was a double-edged sword. Restraint, discipline, resistance. Things Hollis knew that, back then, Zach didn’t. Things Hollis tried to teach them both when he had to play father, hiding Zach’s whiskey bottles in his room, telling Zach he needed to be home before midnight if only to set an example for Elli, washing the dishes after every meal and scolding Zach when he used to let them pile up, refusing to splurge on the brand name products when the store brand was just as good and on sale, saving pennies where he could when Zach would have wasted it all, did waste it all on things that would make him go numb, and that Christmas when he had nothing to give to Elli, Hollis had saved his money to put a present there with Zach’s name written on the tag - the teddy bear in the velvet red dress dappled with roses and tassels and bows and lace - just what she had wanted, when the gift Hollis said was from him was a warmer winter coat and pair of slippers. After that, Zach vowed to be more disciplined. To be a better example for Elli. But the only influence it availed to have on him was in his interactions with Miles and Russell. Too late for either of his siblings. But perhaps not too late for these boys.</p>
<p>Talking to Miles, Zach couldn’t help but feel like he was in the position Hollis was in years ago, telling Zach to take some responsibility. Though something also felt dissimilar to it - Zach was disciplining Miles for using any means necessary to spoil - no, nourish - Russell; Hollis had been trying to pull Zach out of his selfishness. </p>
<p>“About that…I got a notification. Bank account won’t last another night.”</p>
<p>“Shit.” Feeding Russell was the first concern in Zach’s mind, thinking that in the morning, he’d have to take as many apples and oatmeal packets as he could hold in his sweatshirt. But then he remembered that if they were on the street, the packets would be useless unless they had a pot, water, and a stove or cooking fire. They could try to swallow the oats and powder. He winced at the thought. They’d have to drive back downtown, see if there were any temples that didn’t recognize them, for the very least to get a meal. His stomach churned at the thought of the porridge, and he couldn’t help but feel less guilty about Miles and Russell’s theft. “Think we should go back to a temple, see if they don’t not recognize us? Or maybe ask for asylum for a few days?” </p>
<p>“There’s always my truck cabin. Could work for a few nights. I used to do it.” </p>
<p>Zach had also considered it. He knew he wouldn’t mind. But Russell might. Though it would only be a few more nights until they’d get into Harriman Tower, get back his and Russell’s memories along with any others Miles decided he needed, and then they could be on their way. But to where? </p>
<p>And Zach couldn’t help but wonder what kind of person he would discover when he got his own memory back. He hadn’t seen anything on the news reports similar to any of the flashes he had. But somehow, the memory still remained in his hands, in his scars, in the finger curling round a trigger, in the recoil, in the sounds that echoed, the screams and shots he couldn’t be sure were plural. The memory might tell him how he knew Russell, and more important, how to help the boy. But it might also reveal some terrible crime Zach had committed, a crime that had been swept out of the eye of both the media and himself. </p>
<p>Memorosurgery was new. And so too were the Aberrants. But Zach remembered the first time one was discovered. A man with the Brand tried to enact revenge on the memorosurgeons, blaming them for his curse. But the scientists wanted to study him, find out how it mutated. But the man fought back with his power, making the scientists believe in their memories that they had died. Each one had a heart attack. That story was hidden from the public eye for as long as the government and the memorosurgeons could contain it. For a long time, the Aberrants were considered just a myth. If that story could be covered up to protect the infantile public, why not his story? The more Zach thought back to that day, the more those memories haunted him, and the more he felt that whatever his memory, it was something like the discovery of the first Aberrant.  </p>
<p>“Miles, I’m not sure what type of person you think I am. I want to help Russell. But after we download our memories,” he didn’t know how to say it, “I’m not sure who I’ll be.”</p>
<p>Miles tried to laugh off the severity of the tone. “Heh, you think one memory is gonna change who you are?”</p>
<p>“I see these images, hear sounds,” Zach dared, “memories, dreams, I don’t know.” </p>
<p>“Zach…” </p>
<p>“Flashes. Haunt me. A child being dragged into the car of his or her older brother. And I’m with the memorosurgeons - chasing those two. I think that’s what made me leave the profession. It was wrong.” He looked down at his hands, tracing both the fresh wounds from fighting the bounty hunter and the healed scars with his eyes. “And when they started shooting, I did everything I could to take their guns. I-I killed someone.” </p>
<p>“W-what? Hey, you don’t know that, right? Didn’t you wipe that memory?”</p>
<p>“Ever hear of flash-bulb memories? Some memories don’t completely go away if they’re steeped deeply enough in emotion. And I think they haunt me because my conscience won’t let go of,” he couldn’t meet Miles’s gaze, “what I did.” </p>
<p>“Even if it is true, you were protecting those two, right?”</p>
<p>“I think so; I don’t know. I only get bits and pieces. And maybe it’s only my brain trying to fill the gaps.” He held his hands firmly on his lap, trying to conceal the trembling. “Miles, I never was a good person. Never cared about anyone but myself.”</p>
<p>“Man, you need to have more faith in yourself. I know you didn’t do it.” Miles waved his right hand as if to make a point.</p>
<p>“How?” Zach asked, mostly to humor him. </p>
<p>“Because-”</p>
<p>Zach blinked, the flashes of images and sporadic sounds undulating further off now, as if receding. Time appeared to slow down and speed up all at once.</p>
<p>“Because,” Miles continued, calling Zach back across the chasm, “I know you’re a good guy. One memory isn’t gonna change that about you.” He rolled over on his side so he could make sure both of his eyes were looking directly into both of Zach’s. “Trust me.” His voice was low, sleepy, calming, like a voice that punctures a nightmare and releases its soothing melody across the razed landscape, transforming it into something softer, warmer. </p>
<p>Zach didn’t know why, or perhaps he wasn’t willing to admit why, but he believed the tattooed man. Miles always made him feel so safe, yet so strange, and he couldn’t help but lean into that softer, warmer voice. </p>
<p>“Heh, you’re so cute when you’re serious.”</p>
<p>Zach tried to look away, grappling for a ledge to set his eyes. </p>
<p>“Aw, you blushin’? It’s alright, man, I won’t judge. Heh, you already know I’m into guys.”</p>
<p>Flustered, Zach fidgeted with his already trembling hands. Was he really insinuating what he thought he was? He wished he had taken Miles’s offer of beer. It felt like a store of potential energy was building inside him, and he didn’t know whether he should run or face Miles who was still gazing in his direction. </p>
<p>Miles must have known that the tension welded with excitement because he sat up and drew himself to the edge of the bed, facing Zach, knees an inch apart. “Need a better look at your expression, heh,” he teased. “Don’t have my contacts in.”</p>
<p>Zach’s breath quickened, again sensing the lack of space between them. Though it wasn’t the first time Miles dared to position his face so close to Zach’s, the rest was all so unknown to him. Being able to control and abstract memories, being able to go back to a journal entry and replay memories, it was all an attempt to stay within the known. Because the unknown was too unpredictable, too volatile. <br/>If he’d had a cigarette, he could have blamed it on the nicotine, if he’d had a beer, he could have blamed it on the alcohol, if he had his journal, he could have blamed it on his heartbreak over Sarah or some other past regret. But when he leaned in closer to Miles, he couldn’t blame it on anything other than his feelings in that particular moment. </p>
<p>Miles’s lips clasped over his. Zach fumbled with his hands some more, placing them on his own knees, conscious of the desire to place them somewhere, anywhere, on Miles.  </p>
<p>When the tattooed man backed away for a breath, his eyes bounced between both of Zach’s, and he rose from his bed and closed the distance by taking a seat next to him. Then he pressed himself into Zach’s side as his lips pressed against his again, and he swept his hands round and under the hem of Zach’s shirt. </p>
<p>It was months since Zach had been with someone like this, months of t-shirt fabric clinging to him with the sweat provoked by heavy deliveries, months of driving back and forth between drop-offs, months of drinking alone just to overcome those flashes of sounds and images that he felt would need to somehow disappear before he could begin to salvage his life. But the feeling was so new to him - the brushing of stubble against his own chin, the possessive grasping around his neck, the other hand, with the Branded wrist, grazing his thigh. </p>
<p>Released, for the moment, of memories whirling with thoughts that tried to cycle everything back, to ground everything to the past, he pressed back into Miles, and, sensing the reciprocated desire, the tattooed hands enveloped one of Zach’s, guiding it to his thigh.</p>
<p>Zach anticipated, and wanted, more, but was too skeptical, too nervous to move his hands anywhere without Miles’s guidance. Inwardly, he pleaded Miles to lead him further, to place his hands round his cheek, with some sort of affectionate, chaste touch; all while maintaining the thought, the assurance, that this was just what guys did, what good friends did, and that it meant nothing more. And yet, it felt like even more than it had with Sarah, even after one year; she would kiss him on his neck, his shoulders, his chest, and he would sweep his hands down and along her, but his eyes were never there, his mind never there, as his perception melded with wonder and awe of all those objects on her shelves - an escape from an escape. </p>
<p>But with Miles, it was a culmination of feelings provoking an action that he would never have allowed himself to project in his mind to fruition. It had always felt like there was some unspoken barrier between them, like with all the guy friends he had admired. He always blamed it on just clicking with them - his desire to hang out with them, see them, any chance he got. And despite all Miles’s teasing and blatant flirting, that physical wall had always been there, as if repelling Zach and assuring him that nothing would, that nothing could, happen. And yet, he kissed Miles back. And it felt like that barrier crumbled, and he was floundering in an abyss that both enveloped him in everything he knew he was and yet washed away everything he had been, all at once, leaving little deposits of scattered shards on a shore without a country, at the cusp of two worlds. He felt broken, whole, aware, insensate, as those shards melded with the sand, with the ocean, with the sky, with the abyss, until everything was just his lips on Miles’s and his hands on Miles’s thigh and back.  </p>
<p>The click of the bathroom door brought them both back to their external surroundings, and Zach quickly scooted to the opposite side of the bed, careful not to make eye contact with the man he just kissed. </p>
<p>“Pirandello got a little wet,” Russell said, holding out the dripping stuffed elephant. </p>
<p>Miles chuckled, taking an interest in the toy, as if nothing happened. “Aw, let me see. Looks like it’s just his feet.” </p>
<p>“Yeah, he was just testing the water. What’s wrong with your face?” Russell asked, tossing Pirandello into Miles’s lap and drawing closer to Zach. He reached out and pressed his palm on his forehead. “Don’t feel hot.” </p>
<p>Miles rose from the bed and started toward the bathroom. “It’s all that steam you made in the bathtub,” Miles said, winking at Zach then starting up the hairdryer.</p>
<p>Russell threw himself down on their bed and flicked on the tv, switching the channel between two or three different cartoons every time commercials came on. But Zach was somewhere beyond the screen, the thoughts of his previous interaction with Miles still heavy in his mind, and when Miles came back into the room, wielding a fluffed and dried Pirandello, Zach felt even further from the animated creatures that flickered before him. There was a sense of longing that Miles might plop down next to him and, with Russell’s focus stolen by the cartoons, put his tattooed hands back round him, this time the sensation pulsing through his own hands one of a longing for contact rather than its usual resistance to the undulating feelings and movements echoing from his haunting memories.<br/>But when a feeling of disappointment rose up after the man flung himself down on the opposite bed without even a look at him, Zach inwardly denied it. Though his thoughts beckoned to Miles, pulling him into his consciousness, even into his dreams. <br/> </p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0023"><h2>23. Jumbled Visions</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>At first, Miles was kissing him again, passionately, possessively, trailing eager hands over his arms and back, tugging at his clothes, the way Sarah might have, though this time, Zach reciprocated the movements, wanting to mirror the actions rather than lose himself in those inanimate trinkets that lined the walls. </p>
<p>Then a series of images flickered through him; scratched hands, bloody hands, bruised hands, hands wielding a weapon, a gun. Then a series of sounds. Screams. A shot. And then Zach was throwing his fists at Miles, desperately. A shot. As if to tear a weapon away from him. A shot. Not a gun. A shot. A glove? </p>
<p>And then he was back in that car, in the backseat, Dr. Seymour in the front passenger side and a memorosurgeon security guard in the driver’s. And a man was running, carrying a child into the car in front of them, cupping the child’s head close to his chest to protect them - his younger sibling. Zach had always seen the two as Hollis and Elli. </p>
<p>Seymour and the guard trembled in their seats uneasily, and the guard opened his door, readying himself to run after them. But when the man started the car and slammed on the gas, the guard did the same, pursuing them, speed climbing toward sixty on a residential, swerving around other drivers and parked vehicles. </p>
<p>But Zach knew it was all wrong. They were trying to tear the child away from their brother, just so they could take them to the temple. The system didn’t care about families, as long as they had enough brains to dump the public’s unwanted, corrupted, trigger inducing, waste. Creating slaves to memories not their own. </p>
<p>And then the guard passed Seymour a weapon. Not a glove. A gun. The shots echoed in his mind, the number of times indiscernible. And then the guard, holding the steering wheel with his left hand, lifted a gun with his right. </p>
<p>In his mind, the man and the child were Hollis and Elli. And he had to think quickly, decide quickly. He threw a fist at the guard, trying to unsteady him, to divert his focus from driving, from the other car. But he was against both of them, and Seymour battered at him, arms flailing, nails curling down and around his hands, trying to throw them off. A shot tore off over his head. And then he threw a fist at the guard’s skull, as hard as he could. The vehicle spun, spiraling out of control, off toward a blurry mass. The guard’s head slammed against the side window, and Zach lunged forth to grapple for the gun that fell on the man’s navy uniformed lap. </p>
<p>And then a mouth of a gun pointed at him, Seymour peering over it. </p>
<p>Zach’s only thoughts were of Hollis and Elli. </p>
<p>And then he shot.  <br/> </p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0024"><h2>24. Lies</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>He flung the blanket from him in an attempt to fling off those flashes of images that hung so prominently in his mind. But just like a scream that cuts through a relapse’s overpowering waters ultimately succumbs to the waves that crash over the mind once the remnants of the echo are no more, the motion did little to ground him. </p>
<p>He peered over at Miles on the opposite bed, the gentle, affectionate gestures melding with the rapid flurry of fists and guns, movements he knew he couldn’t attribute to the tattooed man but nonetheless began with him. </p>
<p>He wanted to scream, to release himself from the thoughts that encroached and imposed on his surroundings, that penetrated them, that blurred his vision, that melded dreamandmemoryandreality. He tried to assure himself that it had all only been a dream; Russell, still sleeping, curled in a little ball on the other side of their bed, could prove that. He had deleted that memory of whatever happened that made him leave the memorosurgery profession. Those images and flashes that had been strung together as a series were merely a confabulation, the mind’s attempt to fill in those gaps the same way that the mind weaves together unrelated images and sensations in dreams to create a coherent whole - a story that, at least to the dreamer’s mind, makes sense. He was a memorosurgeon; he’d studied neuroscience for four years, studied at the school of memorology for another five, and had been in the early years of his residency under Dr. Seymour when he quit. He assured himself with those facts, with all his knowledge about how the brain worked - in dreams, in memories - scrambling to do whatever it could to make sense of the past, of one’s surroundings, of one’s own perceptions. His brain had just been doing what it had evolved to do. There was no truth in the story that his brain had patched together. </p>
<p>He just needed to get rid of those sensations, to stop them from resurfacing in his mind, from hanging in his present consciousness, from blanketing a film over everything external to him.   </p>
<p>Water.</p>
<p>In the bathroom, Zach wet his hands to splash over his face. The cool liquid would shock his brain, sending a message to his heart to calm its rate.  </p>
<p>But when he looked up to wipe his face, he noticed a scratch on his cheek beneath his left eye. He ran his finger over it, the sting throbbing through his skin, pulsing as the heat welled up beneath his touch. Recent. His fingernails weren’t long enough to do that. He had scratched himself in his sleep before, noticed bruises on his legs that he couldn’t explain. But nothing like this, nothing ever this deep. Stepping away from the sink, he held his arms out for any signs of a fight. He tried so hard not to drink with Russell around. He gave in sometimes, he knew. It didn’t help that Miles instigated him, offering him a can whenever he insisted he needed it just to fall asleep. Sometimes he needed it too.</p>
<p>There were bruises too, running round his forearms, blue and dark purple, wrapping round his wrists, wounds of fingertips digging in, dragging down, grabbing hold again. A struggle. Against whom? Scratches too, above the welts, in staggering lengths, not bleeding, but not scabbed. Scratches that ran down his hands like those he woke up with after deleting something from his mind the night before. Scratches that paralleled bruises – healed paralleling recent. </p>
<p>He’d fallen asleep watching tv with Russ and Miles - that comedy with the shipwreck and that quirky crewmate. </p>
<p>Hadn’t he? </p>
<p>He stepped out of the bathroom as calmly as he could compose, controlling his breath so as to suppress his initial response. Zach checked his bag. The glove was still there, and his gun. He loaded it, the barrel making an identifiable click. Both Russell and Miles roused at the sound, and, seeing Zach with the weapon, both raised themselves quickly, kicking off any bedding. </p>
<p>Before lifting the weapon, he pointed at the door, staring at Miles. “Russell, get out.”</p>
<p>Confused, with sleep still heavy in his eyes and throat, the boy uttered, “Huh? But-”</p>
<p>“Now.”</p>
<p>Zach was Russell’s protector, father figure, and Miles just a friend, someone who’d let him try a sip of whiskey or have that extra cookie if he pleaded or blinked at him enough and tugged at his shirt sleeve. Like he used to do for Elli; though, for Zach, it had all been to get her to leave him alone. </p>
<p>Russell grabbed Pirandello and Capek and stepped out. </p>
<p>Lifting the gun in his right hand, Zach pointed at the scratch beneath his eye with his left index and middle finger. “How’d I get this?”</p>
<p>Miles took a breath, no visible sign of change in expression or increase in heartrate. He whistled and began sliding his hands out of his pockets. “Oof, that happen in your sleep?”  </p>
<p>“Lift your hands, I shoot.”</p>
<p>“Come on, man. How should I know?”</p>
<p>Zach cocked the gun, looking at his tattooed arm, the natural birthmark’s eye amidst all of them staring back at him. “You used it on me.”</p>
<p>“Zach, come on.” He let out a nervous laugh. </p>
<p>“Don’t lie to me. Where’s my journal? You take that too?”</p>
<p>“Look, calm down, I -”</p>
<p>“What about him?” Zach asked, nodding toward the motel room door. He stepped closer to him until his gun hovered an inch before his face. </p>
<p>Children have memories in hazes, remembering one pinpoint of time, the darkness of the room, his face, the feeling of terror as he rolled down the staircase, curling his head in to protect himself, calling out for help, his father, the person he trusted, just stepping down in time with him, unresponsive. He could never remember why he was on the staircase, where he was going or where he came from. But that was normal for children, true of so many children’s memories that no one ever thinks anything of it. And when they grow older, they look back and start to think that maybe it was really just a dream; no, a memory of a dream. Yet, still a memory, and though they understand that because the passage of time blurs all past consciousness, they can never be sure if it was a memory or a memory of a dream. And when they ask the one they trust they say they also don’t remember. But who would admit to watching their child tumble down the stairs without doing anything to help, without even expressing concern or exclamations of terror? And so, the child-turned-adult begins to wonder if it was a memory laced with a lie or a memory that exists independently of anyone else’s perception. But there is no way of confirming the truth of the memory. And the thought that they will never know begins to drive them insane, until they give up on the memory altogether, not caring whether it was reality or deception.</p>
<p>When it is only one particular moment in time that can’t be discerned, it can be let go, and the dreamer who remembers can cling to the truth of things that others can confirm, that a handwritten note can confirm, that a scar can confirm, that a broken toy can confirm, that something, anything, tangible, outside the self, outside the mind, outside the perception, can confirm. But when you can’t be sure of any moment, of any person, of any object, then even the sight of yourself in the mirror seems foreign to you, unidentifiable. Isn’t that what insanity is - losing the ability to affirm the real, giving into the dreamworld until the two merge into an indistinguishable knot, one strand no different from the other?</p>
<p>“Who are you?” Zach demanded, feeling as though he were tumbling down that staircase, Miles standing over and behind him. But it wasn’t even the question at the forefront of his mind. It was said out of his body’s instinct for survival. A primal drive. </p>
<p>Miles whimpered, his arms trembling like he was fighting the urge to lift them. “I-I don’t know.”</p>
<p>Zach pressed the tip of the gun into his cheek. “Like hell.” His finger hovered over the trigger. “Who-” he started to say but was too afraid to complete the question. They warned him during his schooling that once he encountered a memory witch, he could never be certain of himself, his motives, his drives, his reactions. But admitting to the crumbling of all that laid the foundation of who he was would be admitting to an annihilation of the self… “Who am I?” He tried to swallow his words, but they hung in the air, trembling with the pressure of the weapon. </p>
<p>“Am I a memorosurgeon?” he yelled. His memory raced through every person he ever spoke with, ever touched, every location his feet ever stomped, the long smoke breaks at his work, the late night alcohol binges, the hug he gave Elli when he had to tell her, with whiskey thick on his breath, begging her not to use the bathroom until the police came, thinking he’d have to eat a mint and brush his teeth, splash water on his face, drink a cup of black coffee, thinking that they couldn’t see him like this. Not with her. “Where’s Elli?” he demanded. And then he settled on a question that caused him to choke back an invisible substance in his throat, his chest, his eyes, “What happened to Hollis?” </p>
<p>Tears welled in the man’s eyes. “I-I don’t know.”</p>
<p>“What’s real?” Zach spat, but his own voice was like that in a dream, spoken through knees that curled round his face as he tumbled down those hardwood stairs, calling out to the shadow that lingered behind him, the silhouette that never responded. “What of this is real?”</p>
<p>“I don’t know, really!”</p>
<p>“How can you not know?” </p>
<p>He wanted to shoot, to get rid of everything that could be a lie. But killing wouldn’t accomplish that. Even if Miles was lying in not knowing. If he had rearranged his memories, implanted new ones and manipulated old, then he was the only one who could ever know any fragment of a truth. </p>
<p>“Honest,” Miles’s voice cracked, “you-you start creating memories in other people that y-you start to believe them too. They act to them, according to them! It’s like, do I really have this power? Or am I just fooling myself? It’s a curse, a curse, a curse.”</p>
<p>His babbling served to calm Zach. The man seemed almost as crazed as he. He lowered the gun, looking over his arms. “So, what happened to me?”</p>
<p>“Y-you found out last night too. We, we got into a fight.”</p>
<p>Zach peered over at the man, finally seeing through his own rage. Miles was just as bruised and scarred as he was, near mirror injuries. “Found what out? What about Russell?”</p>
<p>“Y-yeah, th-that’s the thing that got you all upset,” Miles said, whimpering again, shrinking himself down, slumping along the motel wall. </p>
<p>His words might be a lie, everything that Miles said, every reaction might be a facade. But for now, it was the only thing close to truth that he could grasp. “What about Russell?” This time, his question came out as a growl.</p>
<p>“Don’t do this, man. You’re not a killer.” </p>
<p>Zach clutched the gun tighter but resisted the urge to lift it again. If he really had gotten upset enough to fight Miles over what he was about to tell him, then holding a gun could be fatal on either end. But was this bit of information all just a setup to catch Zach off guard, a revealed piece of Zach’s tendencies that Miles knew would prevent him from using the weapon?</p>
<p>“You don’t know that!” Zach spat. </p>
<p>“I do.” He sniveled, groveling his hands along the floor. “I do know.”</p>
<p>Memorosurgeons acted as time machines who could erase the past. But the memory witches were the real time machines, who, though they could not manipulate the tangible world, could manipulate as many perceptions as came into contact with it. And, for the idealist, because they could manipulate everyone’s perceptions of the material realm, they also manipulated the material.  </p>
<p>A shot. </p>
<p>The sound echoed inside his mind, calling forth the flashes of images, the gun in his bruised and battered, bloody, hands. He reeled backward, feeling the sensation calling him back to an abyss where dreamandmemoryandreality might sweep over him, beckoning him to give in, to let go, to surrender, to fall back in line with that sensation. To shoot the gun. To stop holding onto his present. To relive his past. Forever.</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0025"><h2>25. Truth</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>“You know what happened,” Zach said. “Tell me, or I’ll shoot!”</p>
<p>“You’re not a killer.”</p>
<p>His finger curled round the trigger, just as it had in those series of images, hands that were his own. Then detached hands. Hands he perceived as his own. Tattooed hands. </p>
<p>“It was you…”</p>
<p>“Zach, listen to me, I-”</p>
<p>“Who were they?” Zach demanded. “The two escaping! The two they were shooting at!”</p>
<p>Miles clasped his hands together, as if praying for his life. “Zach. It was me and Russ.”</p>
<p>Zach blinked. All those moments when he thought their demeanor, their expressions, their features, were uncannily similar, he had attributed it to coincidence, to rubbing off on one another. They were brothers.</p>
<p>Out of anger, Zach lifted the gun again, and as a reaction, Miles screwed his eyes shut, resisting the urge to raise his hands. “His memories were taken.”</p>
<p>“You’re manipulating him!”</p>
<p>“I had to protect him!”</p>
<p>He couldn’t look at the man. To know that this was the way he took care of his brother - by letting him try drinks and cigarettes, putting him on the streets, encouraging him to steal, getting him sucked into all the crap with the politics of memorosurgery, just to - what? To get him to a place where he could be free of the leaders of the temple - just so he can live a life where his memories would be manipulated by his own blood rather than the blood of someone else? </p>
<p>“You would have done the same!” the man said, lifting his hands, no longer caring what Zach did with the gun. His desperation led him beyond the fear of death. “For Elli.”</p>
<p>Flailing arms and legs carried off into a car in front of him. Hair that flickered short and long. Zach had always seen it as Elli in the hands of Hollis; Hollis was rescuing her from the foster home. Detached hands, hands that held a gun, tattooed hands. </p>
<p>Zach shot. It resounded; the echo indistinguishable from the first fire. A shot, a shot, a shot. A bullet pierced the wall above the tattooed man’s head, a picture frame clattered to the floor, the glass shattering. “Where is she?”</p>
<p>“You told me you wished you’d been a better brother,” Miles sputtered as some sort of last plea, “took better care of her, maybe prevented Hollis’s death. Maybe she’s a martyr now too. Another receptacle for the public to dump their trash! Taking away their lives, their freedom, their free will, their ability to think and feel and learn on their own, at their own pace, that’s what’s better for the country, right? For the mental health of the people? I’m not gonna let him become one of ‘em.”</p>
<p>“That memory,” Zach dared. “I’m a killer.” It was a memory, an experience, Zach knew he would use his glove to erase. But Miles must have known it too. </p>
<p>Miles just shook his head, tears streaking his cheeks. “No, no, no…” </p>
<p>Then Zach drew in closer with his gun. “I believe I’ve killed once, what’s stopping me?”</p>
<p>“You didn’t,” Miles yelped. “You’re not a killer.” The gun pressing into his side, he whimpered, “I am.”</p>
<p>Zach thought back to the moment they first met at the bar, how Miles had his cell phone number without Zach ever remembering having given it to him, how the monastic at the temple looked most uneasy when gazing at Miles and appeared reluctant to admit his crime. Then he remembered all those nights they spent talking about their lives, drinking together, and then of his feelings, Zach’s urge to be around him, his affinity toward his carefree nature, the moments they’d tease each other, when Miles would place a hand on his shoulder, poke him playfully in his side - hands that swept over his knees, his thighs. Lips that pressed against his. </p>
<p>“You manipulated me!”</p>
<p>“Zach…”  </p>
<p>“What really happened? Talk! What’d you do? Who’d you kill?”</p>
<p>Miles swallowed hard. “I was a bad brother, right? Told you my dad used to take me on heists ‘cause of my power. When he died, it was the only way I knew how to live. ‘Course I had to take Russell with me. He was too quick to learn. I was stupid. Caught by a bunch’a police. But I got out - thanks to my power. I heard they put Russell in foster, but since I was his only surviving family, he was marked for the temple. That memory,” he said, and Zach pressed the gun harder against his side in anticipation, “your memory. I changed it. I got to the foster home the day you and some other people from the clinic were gonna take him away. Used my power to force myself in. But the foster mother called the police. Cops came and stuffed me in their car behind yours. And they forced Russell into your car!”</p>
<p>Flailing arms, hands clawing at tears. A scream. </p>
<p>“I couldn’t. You understand? I hijacked the cop car. Pursued yours. It was the only way I could stop them. They were firing at me too! So, I took one of the guns. And shot.”  </p>
<p>A shot, a shot, a shot. </p>
<p>“I-I don’t know how many I killed. I regret it; you have to believe me! If I had your power, I’d delete it too. But I needed to keep that memory. For Russell.” </p>
<p>It was the same reason Zach decided to keep his other memories. For Elli - a little girl he wasn’t sure to which world belonged, a being that felt more and more like a phantom with each shaved memory. </p>
<p>“When I got to your car wreck, you-you were still alive. W-we fought, but I mean, you were already pretty beat up from the crash. I used my power and saw who you were, saw that you wiped Russ’s mind with that other surgeon. And I changed your memory.” </p>
<p>“How far did you go back?” Zach demanded. </p>
<p>“I-I don’t know.”</p>
<p>“Then what?”</p>
<p>“I, just, I gave Russell memories so he would meet up with you, would recognize you, trust you.” </p>
<p>Zach thought back to the night Russell was digging around in his truck. The night he believed he met Miles. </p>
<p>“What else could I do? He was wiped!”</p>
<p>“What do I have to do with this? If I really was a memorosurgeon, I was working for the opposing team. You want revenge?”</p>
<p>“N-no. I-it’s the arc-Hive. I know it exists. The feds wouldn’t let memories go without duplicating them. You know that.”</p>
<p>“So, it was a set-up.” </p>
<p>“Zach…”</p>
<p>“You want his memory back.”</p>
<p>“I want my brother back.” Calming himself, he lowered his tattooed arms. “He really likes you, y’know?”</p>
<p>Zach thought back to the bubbles, the late-night cartoons and spilled pancakes, the stolen pastries and plush elephant he named Pirandello, the paper cranes, the broken twig he used to imitate Zach’s smoking, those eyes that pleaded with him not leave him at the temple.</p>
<p>“He’d rather you his brother than me.”</p>
<p>Zach shook his head, believing it was all just an attempt to manipulate him again. “You need to tell him.”</p>
<p>“You said so yourself, I’ve only gotten him into trouble.”</p>
<p>“I can’t,” Zach shook his head, lowering the gun. Miles’s pleading eyes looked so much like Russell’s. “I can’t believe this. I trusted you! I-I lo-” He picked up his bag and stuffed his gun inside. “Forget it.”</p>
<p>“Z-Zach…” </p>
<p>He stormed out, averting his gaze from Russell who knelt outside the door with hands cupped round his ears to listen. Zach ignored his shouts and his crying. Hearing it would only cause him to give in, to recall memories he wasn’t even sure were real, memories that would influence him to behave in certain ways, would make him stay with Russell, embrace him and care for him, just because he had linked the boy with memories of Elli. Memories that might all be a lie. </p>
<p>He couldn’t contain his tears. He still wanted to believe Elli was real, that Hollis was real; somehow, he still wanted to believe that he had been a terrible brother because, when taking care of Russell, it made him feel like he was fulfilling some higher purpose or serving his penance. He wanted to believe that Miles only manipulated that single memory and that everything else, including his feelings for him, were true. </p>
<p>But he couldn’t be sure. He could never be sure. </p>
<p>He thought back to all the warnings he received about memory witches. Those, perhaps, were the only moments he could know were true.</p>
<p>He shouldered his duffle bag and wandered aimlessly, unable to see where he was going. He cried again for his parents’ deaths, for Hollis’s sacrifice, longing for those rare days he had a cigarette with him on the front stoop, for those moments when, even though Hollis scolded him and his consciousness was ensnared by all sorts of substances used to blur his perception, he was in the presence of his brother, in some capacity. </p>
<p>He became a memorosurgeon because of his memory of Hollis; he quit his job and moved to Oakridge because of a memory of killing someone, even if he deleted it, even if he now knew it was fake; he took care of Russell because of his memory of Elli. </p>
<p>All the past plays into this moment and we are what we are… But what if all the past is a lie?  </p>
<p>He sat on a derelict staircase and lit a cigarette, though he wanted a drink. Or perhaps his glove. The guilt he felt about Elli, about Hollis, might all have been for naught. The feeling was there, but he couldn’t be sure they ever existed. He needed to delete everything, to find a place where he would be safe waking as someone without a name, without a family, without a past - a place where he might be able to find a meal, an open hand, a place where he could stay until he could make a new life for himself. </p>
<p>The temples. </p>
<p>He wandered until he saw those red lanterns hanging from a wooden awning. Its front was crawling with ivy and bamboo, and its windows appeared boarded up with a white film that let in the light without revealing either the inside or out. </p>
<p>If he couldn’t be sure of his past, he would take the vows of those who lived their whole lives that way, without ever being sure of anything.</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0026"><h2>26. Brown Eyes</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>“Are you here for confession?” a voice echoed. </p>
<p>A flash of gray rushed past him in the dim light and disappeared just as fast beyond a partition of dark wooden dowels holding up a large sheet of paper so thin it had started disintegrating. A gust of wind? Or was it all in his mind? The partitions created a maze in the space of the room, and he felt that following the phantom might cause him to lose himself amongst the strange walls. A dozen pairs of shoes lay in a pile with their unmatched counterparts, a red clog next to a sneaker he supposed used to be white, a yellow sandal made of straw adjacent to a tan unlaced boot. </p>
<p>The voice had been so strong somehow, but somehow so light, flashing as fast as the ghost that had passed him, but the ghost had been so small, and the voice was like lightning, no doubt emanating from a being as wonderful and terrible as a thunderstorm that brews for hours in the summer sky before releasing its rain for minutes and then relenting its wrath. There was no way the voice had come from the small breeze that had rushed past him.</p>
<p>Zach cleared his throat, long after the ten seconds it takes before the awkwardness that sets in from nonresponse. “Something like that, I guess.” He couldn’t help but feel that someone was going to press a knife or gun through one of the holes in the white paper. Dying in the doorway would beat death from turning a corner in this maze. He scratched his cheek. “This is, uh, my first time.” </p>
<p>“You’re afraid,” said the lightning. It couldn’t be localized. The words bounced around through the strange walls.</p>
<p>“What? No,” he said, trying to assert his second word in a tone that would reassure both the voice and himself. </p>
<p>“Come here.”</p>
<p>He didn’t know where “here” was, but, encouraging his confidence, he took a step beyond the first partition, the thin walls directing his path to a back room where the partitions extended from both opposite walls but left the center floor open. A tall being stood in the center of the floor, at whose feet, several children were pouring over coloring and picture books and playing with old toys - trucks with missing wheels and stuffed animals that had been sewn and resewn. A boy in a grey sweatshirt dragged a toy car vigorously back and forth. The phantom? </p>
<p>The being smiled at him, hands outstretched, palms up, the long robe wrapping far beyond the wrists. The eyes were unwavering in their gaze and the mouth as if cast in stone. The head had hair cropped so short, Zach could hardly discern if the being was bald or if the hair color blended with the skin tone. The face was void of wrinkles and the eyes shimmered with youth though the resoluteness of their stature signaled age and wisdom. Depictions of floral vines ran over the deep brown eyes, over the tan cheeks, the mouth, stretching beneath the high neck of the gown. Man? Woman? Did it matter? Either way, they were terrifying, all at once encompassing the unpredictability and strength of a hurricane and the calm stability of its eye.  </p>
<p>“Fratrem iunoir,” the being said. “Would you read to them?”</p>
<p>From one of the side partitions emerged another adult being, with long, dark hair. They pushed their glasses up their nose and nodded at the terrifying being who stood a head taller. The glasses knelt down on the floor, picked up one of the books that had been set open-faced on the tile, and smiled at the children who gathered with new interest and curiosity at the hem of the shorter being’s robe. </p>
<p>“Advena,” said the lightning. “Follow me to the back room. We’ll find quiet in there.”</p>
<p>He followed, entranced by questions and wonder, like one who follows a strange noise at night regardless of the warning voice in their head. The thought that something exciting, something novel, something that might change their lives forever, might be hiding amongst all the familiar yet estranged furniture in the dark of the night and might reveal itself overcoming the doubt, the rational sentiments, and the fear. </p>
<p>The being slid the door open, motioned to the darkness inside, but, realizing his hesitancy, stepped in first. “We call each other Fratrem here. Do you have a preferred pronoun?”</p>
<p>Zach remembered being asked this in grade school. “He.”</p>
<p>“Frater,” Fratrem said, smiling at him. Though Zach could not be sure it was a smile since their expression had not changed since entering. </p>
<p>When his eyes adjusted to the darkness pierced by streaks of light that penetrated through cracks in the walls or ceilings, Zach saw a small pool of water at the back, surrounded by branching veins that lined the walls, thick black wires embellished at the end with patches. Before the pool was a small table, low to the ground, topped with an old clay teapot and cups without handles and encircled by several red cushions, some with deeper impressions than others. </p>
<p>The lightning knelt in one swift motion onto a cushion, then with eyes shut, began pouring a steaming liquid. “Tea?” They motioned at another cushion across the table, and Zach sat, peering cautiously around the room. </p>
<p>Zach took a cup, reveling in the soothing warmth between his two fingers.</p>
<p>“You can choose to remember this moment, or not,” said the being. “But you must tell me what it is you want to forget.”</p>
<p>“That’s,” Zach lifted the cup to his mouth but didn’t take a sip, “actually not why I’m here. I mean, partially, yes. But I’d like to become a martyr.” </p>
<p>The lightning did not stir, instead, they took a sip of the tea then set it before them, without looking Zach in the eyes. “Not many volunteers.” </p>
<p>“You’re not as surprised as I thought you’d be.” </p>
<p>“When you become a martyr, you give up what you thought of as truth.”</p>
<p>“I already had to.”</p>
<p>“You believe an Aberrant reconfigured your memories.”</p>
<p>The cup trembled in Zach’s unsteady hand. How could this being know what happened to him? Had they already taken one of his memories?</p>
<p>“You’re afraid.”</p>
<p>This time, Zach couldn’t deny it. </p>
<p>“You’re afraid because you can’t be certain of anything anymore. But could you ever be? You base your decisions on everything that happened in your past. You let that influence you. If you became a martyr, you would learn not to live like that. The only thing you can be sure of is this,” they lifted their arm adorned with the long, flowing sleeve and hovered their hand near Zach’s mouth. </p>
<p>Zach looked down at his tea. </p>
<p>“This.” They took a deep breath. “This is the only thing there is, the only thing there ever was. Reflection is no longer identity. Even as the moments sweep by, we can no longer base any decisions on that. The only thing you should base your decisions on, is this.” They breathed in again, deeply. </p>
<p>Zach tried to breathe, to follow the movements of the celestial being.</p>
<p>The being nodded, their dark brown eyes not meeting Zach’s. “What do you see?”</p>
<p>Zach looked at the lightning, his breath catching in his throat. He wondered if the monastics at the other temple would have behaved the same toward him, if only he asked for their help. “I see-” he started to say, but, unsure of how the being wanted him to respond, he stopped. </p>
<p>They smiled and reached a hand up loosely, the fingers curling slightly as if resisting a definitive pose. “With your eyes closed.” </p>
<p>He followed the monastic’s suggestion and breathed again. He had always lived his life in memories, in things he knew, in things he could tie to externalities. Ten thousand images and sounds flashed before and around him, of Sarah holding him as she pointed to all the trinkets on her shelves, of his mother sitting in church with an open book on her lap, of laying in his friend’s apartment exchanging bottles and rolls of paper, of Elli coloring and cutting at their kitchen table, of Hollis peering down at Elli as he jostled a pan on the stove, of Elli rushing out of the foster home to embrace Hollis, and then of Russell doing the same with Miles. </p>
<p>Then he felt rage, and the image of him pressing the gun into Miles’s side flashed in front of him, and, in his mind, he pulled the trigger.   </p>
<p>“Relax,” the thunder cut through, and then Zach realized he was fidgeting in his seat, shifting his weight uncomfortably. “Let them be. Let them settle. The right one will surface from among them.” </p>
<p>And then the gun was facing a being who also held a gun, a being in a white coat, a being shooting at Hollis and Elli. Zach knew that the memory was false, that in reality, Miles had taken control of the police car behind him and shot the memorosurgeon driving Zach’s vehicle with Russell in the back seat. At once, Zach became both beings, the one holding the gun to the memorosurgeon to stop them from shooting at the siblings and the one shooting at the car ahead of them to stop the child from being ripped away from those same hands. </p>
<p>Miles had manipulated Zach’s memory so that he would feel compassion for Russell, would feel like he needed to protect him. But Miles had abstracted himself when reworking Zach’s memory, omitted himself completely. In that memory at least, Zach’s feelings toward Miles didn’t matter; only his concern for Russell. As long as Russell was safe, it didn’t matter what happened to Miles. Miles had done something Zach could never do; something Zach regretted never having done for Elli, for Hollis; something Hollis had done every day, every moment, before and after their parents died: to protect someone else, he let himself go. Zach had wanted so badly to cling to everything: to his high school friends; to his time alone in his room, drinking or smoking; to his commitment to memorosurgery, even if that meant ignoring Elli, sending her away; to his glove; to his journal; to his ability to graft and cleave memories to mold his identity into the being he felt was his idealized self. He spent his life always running from things - from responsibilities, from memories, from guilt, from regrets, washing them in waves of substances that would mask the pain, electrocuting them with wires that would annihilate their flickering presence - always from, never toward. </p>
<p>And as he breathed in again, he thought what it might be like to let himself go, like Miles did, to stop running from pain and guilt and regret and suffering, to omit himself from his memories. Self-annihilation. No, not so violent. The absence of self. Or, perhaps, an absorption of self - into memories, into feelings, into hands, into siblings. A child flailing and screaming swept into the car ahead of him flickered between Elli and Russell. And the hands that flickered between his own and someone else’s - between tan and scarred and pale and tattooed, hands detached from him - suddenly felt more his own.  </p>
<p>He cared for - no, loved - Miles and Russell because of the time, the moments, the experiences he had with them. Even if the threads of that love began in memories, even if those memories were false. </p>
<p>Sometimes love overcomes even truth.  </p>
<p>“What do you see?” the being asked again. </p>
<p>Zach rose to feet that were no longer his own. “I-I think I have to go back,” he said. </p>
<p>“Not become a martyr?”</p>
<p>He looked into their soft, brown eyes, and, as he did, a strange feeling welled up inside his chest, “I’m sorry; I can’t stay here. I-I have to help someone. Some people I love.”</p>
<p>The being nodded, and they gently brought their hand up to their eye, dabbing it lightly then letting it fall away just as quickly. Weren’t martyrs supposed to live with the pain and suffering of memories without letting them affect them; meditating day and night to attain stability, never laughing, never becoming angry or afraid? They never cried. </p>
<p>“Z-Zach,” they said at last. “Ad pacem.” </p>
<p>And then as if the water that the being wiped away refused to vanish, a tear welled up and sprouted along Zach’s cheek. </p>
<p>Their eyes knew.</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0027"><h2>27. Without</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Zach stepped out of the temple, wishing he had mentally mapped his wanderings before arriving at the sanctuary. He needed to find his way back to the motel, back to Russell, to Miles. He couldn’t be sure anything Miles said was true; he had manipulated both him and Russell. Merely having the Brand on his wrist made him untrustworthy; Zach experienced firsthand the tactics of the memory witches that all his mentors had ever warned him about. No, Aberrants. Beings who were convinced their own genetic code was a curse because it made them targets for the infantile public. </p>
<p>But Zach had been manipulating his own memories for so long that he couldn’t even trust himself, didn’t even know what type of person he really was. Miles wasn’t the best influence, but the two brothers had pulled Zach out of the past. And even if all the past wasn’t true, the feelings of his present were. Even if it meant helping Miles and Russell on false pretenses, he would do it. Even if the only reason he helped Russell was because of his guilt for not being there for a sister who never existed, he would do it. There were memories that warned him against helping Miles, a man the public deemed a “memory witch.” But maybe it could be his way of freeing himself from his past, by acting contrary to it. </p>
<p>The world around him no longer called up images from his past, sounds no longer mingled with or echoed from distant times. It was as if he woke up and fell asleep all at once.  </p>
<p>And then, as if drawn out of a dreamworld, beckoned across time and beyond the barrier between mind and surroundings, he perceived a figure running up to him that clasped him round his legs - the way Elli used to when she pleaded with Zach for attention. </p>
<p>Zach reached his arms down and scooped Russell into them, tears no longer restrained, staining his face, blurring his vision. </p>
<p>“Z-Zach,” another, lower voice said, and Zach quickly wiped his face.</p>
<p>“H-hey.”</p>
<p>“Zach, I’m so sorry,” Miles babbled. “Look, I understand if you don’t want me here or don’t believe a word I say. It’s just, Russell wanted to find you. And well, I was worried about you too. I know I don’t have a right, but-”</p>
<p>“Miles,” Zach interrupted, “I-I,” his words were hard to get out, as if a part of him still clung to his past, to his memories, to his knowledge that Miles had manipulated him, had fed him memories, had reconfigured his identity. But he pushed past those feelings and went on, “I would have done the same. For Elli and Hollis.” </p>
<p>Miles took a cautious step forward, rubbing his tattooed hands nervously, as if Zach’s words of acceptance caused a frisson in Miles that bubbled up into movement that couldn’t be contained, and when Zach smiled at him, he must have taken it as an invitation because he ran up and clasped his arms round him and his brother. And he wept.   </p>
<p>“Zach,” Russell whined desperately, clawing at his chest and shoulders. “Don’t leave us again!”</p>
<p>“I won’t,” Zach said, trying to stifle a chuckle at the boy’s eagerness. </p>
<p>“Promise?”</p>
<p>And for once, he said the words not because the boy reminded him of Elli, not because of a sense of obligation or responsibility, not because of his guilt of and regret for the past, but because he loved Russell. And he loved Miles. Without ties to memories. Without strands that weaved round and through threads of that which he could claim he already knew. Without roots grounding him to flashes of sounds or images from a far-off world he once called his past. Without attachments. </p>
<p>“Of course.” He buried his face into Russell’s hair as he gripped Miles’s tattooed arm tightly. “Of course.”</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0028"><h2>28. Trust</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Miles parked his truck outside of the motel where they stayed the past few nights, hoping that the staff wouldn’t raise an eyebrow and find out they weren’t actually renting a room. </p>
<p>Zach played with Russell who insisted that Zach play with the paper crane he named after him, saying that his name now suited the bird better, that he looked more like the origami creature: “a little crumpled but freer.” </p>
<p>After some time, Zach told the boy he was going to check on Miles who sat further out in the glade, pulling at blades of grass. </p>
<p>“Want one?” Zach asked as he took a seat next to, holding out a pack of cigarettes. “You look like you need it.”</p>
<p>Miles wafted his hand at it and plucked a few more pieces of grass. “Nah, I should really quit, heh.” His eyes not leaving the line of trees, he took a breath and said, “Zach, you don’t need to be here. Don’t need to forgive me either.”</p>
<p>“How do I know you’re not keeping me here?” Zach laughed, though he knew it was only half a joke, and Miles didn’t laugh. </p>
<p>“It might be better if you stayed away from me. Or left.”</p>
<p>Zach stiffened. “Look, we both have something in common,” he said, and he pointed over at Russell who was clashing his toys together. “We both want what’s best for him. And maybe that feeling is because of a memory you changed in me, but there’s an objective truth in all this. Taking kids’ memories isn’t right - taking them, against their will, away from their families. Even if the only reason I’m concerned about him now is because of a memory that isn’t true, I should be concerned for him. Everyone should be concerned for kids like him. And even if it was your power that gave me empathy for these kids, I’m glad you did. And it proves to me you’re not selfish. I think I was the selfish one. I am.”</p>
<p>Miles blinked at him. “Zach…”</p>
<p>“The way we were taught about Aberrants, it was like they would use any means necessary to control others for their own gain. But it was never about you, was it? It was about him.”</p>
<p>“Z-Zach, you don’t have to believe me, and I know my own mind is messed up, b-but I never tampered with your perception of me.”</p>
<p>“I think, I believe you…” Miles could have reconfigured Zach’s memory so that he wouldn’t remember that Miles had ever manipulated him. Miles had admitted to using his power on him once - they must have fought about it the night before; Zach must have exploded when he found out that Miles was Russell’s brother and that he was manipulating the boy. But the fact he remembered those things perhaps proved that Miles wasn’t controlling him completely. It would be so easy for him to rework Zach’s memories, make him forget they ever argued, reconfigure some memory of him getting into a fight at a bar to explain the scratches and bruises; he could have even caused Zach to forget Miles even had the Brand if he chose. But that was why, in some weird way, the fact that he still felt he couldn’t fully trust Miles, actually meant that he could.</p>
<p>“So, what happened to me?” Zach asked, pointing at the scratches on his face, then to those similar markings on Miles. “Sorry about that.”</p>
<p>“You’re not the one who should be apologizing.” Miles turned to him, forced a smile then sighed. “I shouldn’t have fought back. I-I don’t know how it started. Think you dozed off, had a dream, must’a seen flashes from the memory I gave you that you tried to delete. My hands. Started asking questions. ‘bout what I did that got us kicked out of the temple. You started catching on, getting heated. Then Russell jumped in to protect me, let it slip that I’m his brother. You thought that was me just manipulating him, grabbed your gun. I mean, I couldn’t let you wave that thing around in front of him. I-I know you’d never do anything to him, but, I mean, your whole world just fell apart. I didn’t know what you’d do. I felt I had to change your memory, y’know? How else could I protect him?”</p>
<p>Zach just nodded. “How long has he known? That you’re his brother?”</p>
<p>“Day we went to the minimart. Fed him a memory of us as kids growing up together. It might only be as I remember it, but it’s better than nothing.” Miles looked at him in the eyes now, the blue was soft, wavering like a river, one about to burst forth from its banks. “Look, Zach, I’m so sorry, I needed to get his memory back. I just wanted him back - all of him. I regret so much of what I did. I am a monster, I know I am. I saw you in that car, knew you were a memorosurgeon, thought you could help us, so I just fed him a memory that would lead him to you, thought you could just help take care of him and help us get his life back. B-but then, y-you became so much more.”</p>
<p>Zach nodded again, not meeting the man’s eyes. He felt drawn to him, remembering their moment in the motel room. He wanted to give in to the feeling, but when he turned back toward Miles, the tattooed man looked away quickly, as if respecting Zach’s inability to trust him, his Branded hands anchored to the grass. He hated seeing Miles like this. And Zach made up his mind that he didn’t care if Miles manipulated him, didn’t care if Miles was manipulating him even now. To feel love like this, to feel that his past didn’t matter, to feel deep concern for someone other than himself, it seemed to make him become the person he swore he’d always be. And yet, he was beginning to realize that wasn’t the objective either. </p>
<p>From his sweatshirt pocket, he produced two wands and the bottle of bubbles. He held one of the wands out to Miles as he might a cigarette. “The healthier option.” </p>
<p>“The good-influence-option.” Somehow, Miles was always conscious of the true objective.</p>
<p>When they started sending bubbles into the forest, Russell finally took notice and joined them. Miles offered the boy his wand, but Zach insisted Russell take his. The soft, somber smile Miles gave him pierced him, its gentle warmth uncharacteristically tearing through memories, perceptions, and hopes. Miles might not have always been the best influence, but there were things he taught Zach, things that rubbed off on him, things innate to Miles despite his omnipotent power over memory, things Zach knew he was long overdue for learning. And perhaps with each learned behavior he modeled, he was gradually breaking down those barriers he had scaffolded round himself to lay claim to everything he believed he was and to ward off anything he asserted he was not - the blurring of lines between himself and Miles. Maybe the self really was just a mirage. </p>
<p>The bubbles danced round one another before bursting against the trees, the suds of one bubble merging with the others, with the trunks, with the leaves.</p>
<p>Russell babbled on about the storyline of his toys: “…so then Pirandello and Capek got into a fight and Zach had to break it up…” But Zach fell off sometime after the paper crane used his wings to waft the sand away from the elephant and to cast the waves away from the robot, instead wishing life might always be like it was in that moment and that the protest wasn’t so close. He didn’t know what might happen afterward; he wanted to go to Valhalla with them, to leave society behind, to truly leave his past behind, to be with Russell and Miles forever. But it seemed like a far-off dream. And he never was good at projecting into the future.<br/> </p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0029"><h2>29. Human</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>They spent the next two days in the glade, pandering into the edges of the woods, looking for rabbit tracks or snake holes. Miles would go off, saying he needed some time alone to think or smoke, during which Zach would play with the toys with Russell or gather sticks to build a little tent where Pirandello could live. Miles would return with just enough food for them, no more - apples, a loaf of bread, sometimes celery or tomatoes, not the cinnamon pastries or egg rolls that would have been considered luxuries - the bare necessities to sustain them. Zach never asked how he got them nor cared to wonder. Miles was labeled a public enemy, a being who, if found, would either be restrained or killed, the murder justified by public safety - morality constructed to serve the needs of the majority. </p>
<p>With the protest drawing nearer, Zach couldn’t help but voice his anxieties about getting into Harriman Tower, about wading through the angry mob, about the monitoring police forces who were likely to oversee the event. Miles tried to assuage him by saying that the police wouldn’t recognize any of them amidst all the unrest, that they’d figure everything else out together. They tried to explain to Russell that they were going to get his memories back, but he didn’t seem to care, saying that the only thing that really mattered was that he remembered, no, that he knew both of them. He took more of an interest in their guesses at what the arc-Hive might look like - sprawling, pulsing wires or giant LED screens or a panel of a thousand controls. The thought of the arc-Hive frightened Zach; he had specialized in the deletion of memories, not transplants. But Zach would put up with his fears if it meant reclaiming what Russell had been robbed of, if it meant getting Miles to a place of safety, beyond those who wanted him crucified for a genetic mark he didn’t ask for.</p>
<p>***</p>
<p>The night before the protest, Zach looked over his shoulder in the truck, still unable to sleep in his upright position in the passenger seat, his neck aching and legs cramped beneath the glove compartment. Miles’s back pressed firmly against the truck’s partition, his body slightly curled round his brother who faced the driver’s seat, his mouth slightly open, dark hair cast over his closed eyelids, their breathing in synch. Miles’s hand rested gently on Russell’s shoulder, the mark that revealed him as a public enemy hidden in the folds of his brother’s sweatshirt. He saw Russell in the older brother, the smoothed brow, the occasional flutter of the eyelids, as he nuzzled his nose beneath his brother’s hair to get comfortable then shifting again to place his chin over his forehead. </p>
<p>Zach knew others saw him as a monster, someone whose very presence undoes reality, who can change your identity, who can make you believe that he’s your brother, make you believe that he’s there to protect you, make you believe that your actions are of your own free will, that all of your past actions were of your own free will, that the choices that led you to this particular moment were yours. A monster who can make you believe that you are an alcoholic and the cravings that drive you to escape beckon from somewhere in your body, telling you just one more and you’ll still be ok, but whether from the chemicals in the brain or from a memory, the science could never calculate. That you had a sister who you never told when you were drunk, and when you stumbled in the doorway, you’d ask her a question like you weren’t inebriated and pass her a juice box from the fridge while taking a water even though you wanted another drink, just so you wouldn’t be able to focus on her face because it was so much easier to lie to a blur. That you’d do anything to protect that sister, but that the car crash was too much to handle every day, especially when she asked about it or reminded you of the Friday night movies when you’d all sit together and eat cut watermelon and cantaloupe from a communal bowl. That you had a mother who was health conscious and never even had a bottle of wine in the house. That, even after the crash, the little sister reminded you of that grape juice stain and how your mother worried that someone was drinking wine, though when the little sister said the word, she giggled, not knowing what it meant - the proof and volume, the horizontal license at 21. That after the crash, you failed to be responsible, that you went numb while the nutritional habits clung to your older brother who was forced to experience reality for two, who wanted to fight mental health issues on the outside but couldn’t win the battle inside, whose high marks in school couldn’t prepare him for being a father and mother all at once, especially when all you could care about was escaping. That you only seemed to wake up when the little girl went to sleep, but that the responsibility had been taken too late, that, even still, you couldn’t get your act together, could only stay sober long enough to assist during the surgeries, that no one but your search history knew about your binges. That you couldn’t even look that little girl up in the system because you knew you couldn’t face her like this. </p>
<p>A beast who could make Zach remember that little girl every time he looked at his brother. Creating memories, linking memories, manipulating memories, unweaving the tapestry of the Fates and reweaving it anew, the original lingering in a dimension beyond the reach of physical perception, lost in the fourth dimension - the ambiguity of time. </p>
<p>A fourth dimensional being - no ghost - who doesn’t walk through time but witnesses it, travels not in it but beyond it. </p>
<p>A magician, a witch, mutant, a target for destruction because, in most societies, even an accidental threat must be destroyed - a threat to the system, to order, to knowledge, to logic, to control, to the hierarchy of power. To some, he sounded like a savior. Yet alone, afraid of his own power and a slave to it. </p>
<p>To Zach, he was none of those horrible stereotypes. And especially now, he looked so helpless, so vulnerable. So human. Of course, he had a power that made him greater than the others, but it wasn’t so different from the power memorosurgeons wielded, that technology experts and scientists strived to attain; the only reason they feared him was because Aberrants had evolved faster than they could experiment, create, control, restrain. Funny how the power manifested in people who didn’t want it. And someone had biased the information shared with the public to create fear for them. When they were like everyone oppressed by systems of power - trying to protect those they love. </p>
<p>And as he looked at the man, it felt like all of Zach went out to him. And for once, he didn’t seem to mind if he received nothing in return.</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0030"><h2>30. Meaning</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Deciding at last that he couldn’t get any sleep, he snuck out of the truck and, taking a seat on the dirt, curled his arms round his right knee as he gazed up. He’d always been afraid of things larger than him, things he couldn’t control - elephants at the zoo, the giant whale replica that hung from the ceiling at the museum, ocean waves over ten feet, cruise ships, statues at art exhibits that towered over him, the view of his feet dangling in a lake of water whose bottom remained indistinguishable. The expanse of darkness, dappled with beads of light, threatened to flow down upon him, envelope him, the darkness swelling, mingling, intertwining with the air surrounding him. He could identify Scorpius and held onto what he knew of the constellations, impositions made by man to explain the unexplainable, the unknown, the vast, the sublime. To cast a part of humanity on the inhuman. </p>
<p>But if he leaned back a little and looked beyond the hook of its tail and the anchor of its snout, his mind stopped thinking, stopped sorting through names and scientific practices and myths, stopped grasping at memories that were supposed to make sense of the world around him. </p>
<p>The passenger side door opened with a click and then closed just as quietly. Miles sat down next to him, without saying a word.  </p>
<p>Zach couldn’t help but look over at the man’s tattoos - the wolf, the Japanese kanji or Greek letter, the tree with red bark, the blue mandala, the flock of birds, the twisting metal gears, the shapes with rough edges that looked incomplete, thinking of them now like the stars. He had always tried to attribute a meaning to each one, thought that each had its own story, each a memento of an experience, his skin serving as the canvas of an external self, the way Zach’s journal had, never once thinking that, maybe, they were there just for the sake of being there. L’art pour l’art. </p>
<p>Then he peered over at the man’s right wrist, bent, curling over his knee as it propped up the hand that held his three dominant fingers that fidgeted close to his mouth. A natural mark that blended with the manmade ink peered over at Zach with its eye, distinguishable only by those who knew about its terrors - to a child, one with untrained eyes and unbiased mind, hidden amidst its synthetic counterparts. Unlike the stars whose ersatz pattern stood as the anomaly amidst an abyss of divine creation, the congenital code for the Brand, now surfaced, peered back at him, sometimes sinking under, sometimes surfacing above, the sea of etched skin, painted by human hands.</p>
<p>“What does it feel like?” Zach said at last, his eyes not leaving the other man’s wrist.</p>
<p>Miles instinctively covered it with his right hand. “I take my bracelet off when I sleep.”</p>
<p>Zach looked away, realizing his bashfulness. He understood. It was never easy talking about something you’ve been hiding from others for so long, having people stare it right in the face. </p>
<p>“Physically, not like much.” He brushed it up and down lightly with his fingers. “You ever have it where, you suddenly get a flashback of something that happened to you, maybe a long time ago, and you lose sight of everything that’s around you, can’t even hear anything ‘cept the voices that echo from back then?”</p>
<p>Zach nodded. All too often.</p>
<p>“It’s like that. I see the memory and then I have to think about what I want it to be. Sometimes it’s voluntary. Sometimes,” he trailed off and took a deep breath. “Must not be so different as when you wear your glove.”</p>
<p>The glove. Zach was suddenly back inside the truck, zippered up in the duffle bag underneath the steering wheel, huddled against toothpaste and haphazardly folded clothes and granola bar wrappers. </p>
<p> “Not really. At least when I…use it on me.” As if searching for the sleek fit and the wires pulsing down his thin muscles, his hand trembled. Cigarettes used to calm the nerves in his hands, but now that even Miles was quitting, he felt he should do the same. “Kinda just a loss of feeling, really. Maybe the feeling is really just a sense of absence.”</p>
<p>Miles held out his right wrist so Zach could take a closer look. “Sometimes, if my life is getting really dull, I use it to give myself a vision, like, of what my life could be. Helps me strive for something bigger, heh.”</p>
<p>“Like a dream?”</p>
<p>Miles smiled, moving his hand closer to him, his fingers spread out in surrender, palm facing the starry sky, then nodded toward the mark, as if inviting Zach to feel it. Zach ran his fingers over its smooth flesh, the surfaced tint no more elevated than the ink of his tattoos. </p>
<p>“See, heh? Not so scary.”</p>
<p>Zach nodded, thinking again of those stars. Perhaps it was the unknown that was to be less feared than the known - ideas tainted with human criticism and skepticism and prejudice, things he was unwilling to admit about himself, things he pushed away because he knew his mother’s religion wouldn’t approve, experiences he held onto because he knew his memories compelled him to become a memorosurgeon, because he knew that his past influenced his choices, his emotions, his perceptions, his preferences, his interpretations. And yet, the presence of something unknown embraced him, wrapped its arms round him, released him of all that had been known to him, freed him of that known, yet somehow did not rob him of it.</p>
<p>Miles looked up at Zach as he caressed his wrist, the mark that made him enemy to all. The man’s lips parted slightly, his blue eyes reflecting the wild maze of stars, the pupils bouncing back and forth between both of Zach’s. </p>
<p>Zach shook his head. “Sounds nice.”</p>
<p>The unknown. The feeling deep inside him. The beating of his heart his mind would have attributed to fear - to tie it to the known. The cold breath filling his lungs that expelled from his lips as heat that his mind would have attributed to the change in air temperature. The release of words that comprised meaning, the perception of the deep shades of ink, the warmth of skin, the whisper of the trees, senses that spread roots into the present moment rather than grounding themselves in images, feelings, sounds of memories. No longer the determined past. The uncertain present. The unknown.</p>
<p>He lifted Miles’s hand to his own skull and screwed his eyes shut at the contact. </p>
<p>“You want me to-?” Miles’s words came out uncertain, without the confident lilt they always carried. Perhaps even Miles was yet mostly unknown to him, a being built only in Zach’s perception by the few bricks of words and actions that the man chose to reveal to him. Zach nodded, still leaning into Miles’s palm. </p>
<p>At first, he was looking up at the sky again, points of light to which he could not assign names, whose distances he could not sort into lines. Then he became aware of a heat emanating from a stronger light in front of him, the flames licking scraps of wood enveloped by a circle of stones. The light shone against thick red trees whose trunk stretched over a dozen arm spans, trees that, before, Zach would have feared. Russell sat across from him, excitedly reaching over toward Miles who sat with a bag of marshmallows on his lap, fed one onto a stick then handed it to the boy. And then Miles looked over at him and smiled. They were away from the memorosurgeons, the protests, the police, the government-run temples. Somewhere beyond the known. A vision of the future - created in the past. </p>
<p>When Zach opened his eyes, his mind first told him that it had happened, but feeling Miles’s hand still pressed against his temple, he knew it was only a mirage. </p>
<p>“The redwoods.”</p>
<p>Miles nodded. “Valhalla. Beyond all this shit.” Releasing his gentle pressure against Zach’s temple, he brushed his hand slowly down Zach’s shoulder, at first also releasing his gaze from Zach’s eyes, then as he grazed his fingers against his arm, peered into them again, as if to make sure Zach didn’t flinch. It was unknown to Zach, and yet, somehow, he wasn’t afraid. When Miles’s hand reached Zach’s palm, he spread his fingers against Zach’s, curling, intertwining between them, the wrist marked by the demon brand pressing into his. Hands that had both touched human memories, sifted through, sorted, deleted or manipulated, hands that had gone beyond boundaries of the physical. Hands that penetrated barriers that other humans hadn’t, couldn’t cross, yet hands that now faced a divide between persons, yet somehow made those feel more connected than an overlap of thought, of influences, of experiences. </p>
<p>Anyone else who knew about the Brand would have fled, tried to contain him, experiment on him, suppress his power, would have spat on him, called him a witch. The man had to hide what others couldn’t accept, what others would have hated him for. Zach could relate, at least within his familial circle - parents who thought deleting memories was wrong or that certain forms of love were somehow wrong. But they both accepted each other – despite knowing what made the other an outcast. </p>
<p>When Miles leaned forward, Zach mirrored his movement, and his wrist suddenly felt warm, the feeling sweeping up into his chest. </p>
<p>“M-Miles,” called a voice, somehow grounding him and calling him to a distant world all at once. “Z-Zach.” </p>
<p>Miles was the first to turn to see the boy sliding down the side of the truck. “I-I had that nightmare again.” </p>
<p>“C’mere.” Miles reached his arm out, the fingers that had just been curling round Zach’s now embracing Russell’s shoulder. Zach found himself craving the touch again. </p>
<p>“I think the waves are outside that building we’re going to.”</p>
<p>“Aw, waves and sand aren’t so scary. Heh, especially when you got your big bro and Achilles over here.” He pushed Zach lightly, and Zach laughed nervously, still aware that his cheeks were flushed, his mind dancing in a vortex of the previous moment, but unable to tether the experience to his distant past, he wrapped his arm round Russell, his forearm brushing against Miles’s. </p>
<p>“Can I stay up with you guys?”</p>
<p>Miles nodded, then pointed at the stars, making up names for them - names not written in any astronomy book, names that would remain unknown to everyone else but them, names that made Russell laugh and forget about his dream, names that made no attempt to control, names that served only as a means of sharing something that belonged only to them, names that had no meaning other than that single moment, names that even after Russell long forgot, Zach would still remember. <br/> </p>
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